round up

British  

verb

1. to gather (animals, suspects, etc) together

   to round ponies up

2. to raise (a number) to the nearest whole number or ten, hundred, or thousand above it Compare round down

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noun

1. the act of gathering together livestock, esp cattle, so that they may be branded, counted, or sold

2. any similar act of collecting or bringing together

   a roundup of today's news

3. a collection of suspects or criminals by the police, esp in a raid

round up Idioms  

1. Collect or gather in a body, as in We'll have to round up some more volunteers for the food drive, or The police rounded up all the suspects. This term comes from the West, where since the mid-1800s it has been used for collecting livestock by riding around the herd and driving the animals together. By about 1875 it was extended to other kinds of gathering together.

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

round up

Now they also realize they “don’t want these excesses, don’t want the federal government to come in and round up everyone, especially people that don’t have a criminal past.”

From Slate ● Sep. 21, 2026

When Saint Mary’s dropped its football program, he called the East Bay school not only to recruit players but to round up equipment that would otherwise go unused.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 5, 2026

Madrid deployed police and military forces to round up most of the migrants and escort them back to the border with Morocco.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 2, 2026

A core of Minneapolis activists is playing a high-stakes game of cat and mouse with the federal agents deployed in force to the midwestern city to round up undocumented immigrants.

From Barron's ● Jan. 28, 2026

For the next forty-eight hours, all the WEC members we could round up worked frantically, putting the names, addresses and phone numbers of all thirty thousand registered voters in Little Rock onto note cards.

From "The Lions of Little Rock" by Kristin Levine

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Related Words

• bring in
• bring together
• herd

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