upend

present singular third person upends · participle present upending · participle past upended · past upended

1. transitiveTo end up; to set on end.
2. transitiveTo tip or turn over.

   upend the box and empty the contents

   2 more examples

   When he upended the bottle of water over his sleeping sister, the lid popped off and surprised them both.

   Venezuela, who introduced the exciting 17-year-old Samuel Sosa late on, pressed forward and eventually carved out a golden opportunity to level. Jake Clarke-Salter, the Chelsea defender, upended Peñaranda inside the box and after consulting the threesome of video officials inside the Suwon World Cup stadium, the referee, Bjorn Kuipers, pointed to the spot.

   2017 June 11, Ben Fisher, “England seal Under-20 World Cup glory as Dominic Calvert-Lewin strikes”, in the Guardian

3. figurativelytransitiveTo destroy, invalidate, overthrow, or defeat.

   The scientific evidence upended the popular myth.

   2 more examples

   James Meredith's forced admission was a milestone in upending the old order in America's most segregated state, a kind of race relations ground zero.

   1997 May 4, Adam Nossiter, “Ground Zero”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   What is unbearable, in fact, is the feeling, 13 years after 9/11, that America has been chasing its tail; that, in some whack-a-mole horror show, the quashing of a jihadi enclave here only spurs the sprouting of another there; that the ideology of Al Qaeda is still reverberating through a blocked Arab world whose Sunni-Shia balance (insofar as that went) was upended by the American invasion of Iraq.

   2014 November 17, Roger Cohen, “The horror! The horror! The trauma of ISIS [print version: International New York Times, 18 November 2014, p. 9]”, in The New York Times

4. figurativelytransitiveTo affect or upset drastically.

   By the middle of March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic upended normal life for virtually all Americans.

   3 more examples

   Coral, another company trying to upend the salon industry, obtained $4.3 million in venture funding around the same time. But Bradley Leong, the company’s chief executive and co-founder, said that because they could not get the device’s price as low as they had hoped in its current iteration, they were making it semirobotic to decrease the cost.

   2021 June 1, Ellen Rosen, “Want Your Nails Done? Let a Robot Do It.”, in The New York Times

   A week of public health reversals from the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has left Americans with pandemic whiplash, sowing confusion about coronavirus vaccines and mask-wearing as the Delta variant upends what people thought they knew about how to stay safe.

   2021 August 2, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Michael D. Shear, “Americans Suffer Pandemic Whiplash as Leaders Struggle With Changing Virus”, in The New York Times

   At the same time, the labs themselves believe that their models will soon grow so advanced that they will upend nearly all industries, wiping out huge numbers of jobs.

   2025 December 11, Charlie Campbell, Andrew R. Chow and Billy Perrigo, “The Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year”, in Time

1. A hamlet in Kirtling parish, East Cambridgeshire district, Cambridgeshire, England (OS grid ref TL7058).