Glow-up
noun, slang ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A major and impressive transformation in appearance, talent, power, etc. slang
"I recognised this in college, before he got his teeth done, before he got the tan and the #confidence and the style, back when he was obsessed with Eminem and had terrible bleached hair. I bagged him as my bestie nice and early, before his uber glow-up."
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"I recognised this in college, before he got his teeth done, before he got the tan and the #confidence and the style, back when he was obsessed with Eminem and had terrible bleached hair. I bagged him as my bestie nice and early, before his uber glow-up."
Etymology
From glow + up, modelled after such deverbals as blow-up; diachronically, probably not a deverbal from the verb glow up, which was back-formed from the noun.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.