setup

UK/ˈsɛtʌp/US/ˈsɛtʌp/

nounB1Common in everyday speech and writing · #2,690 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: setups

A setup is the way something is arranged, or a trick to frame somebody. A nice setup, the whole thing was a setup, change the setup.

The framing sense is the sharper one and always accuses somebody of arranging events to trap another. In comedy the setup is the first half of the joke, and the punchline is the second.

Definitions of setup

1nounsetupThe way something is arranged, or a trick to frame somebody.B1
“The band spent an hour on the stage setup before the show.”

setup is an arrangement.

Where it comes from

Deverbal from set up.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

setup in the wild

As closers were reduced to one-inning specialists, setup men became more prominent.
Setup man
After closers became one-inning pitchers, primarily in the ninth inning, setup pitchers became more highly valued.
Setup man
WiX includes a Visual Studio extension that allows creating and building WiX setup projects using the Visual Studio IDE.
WiX
The single-camera setup originally developed during the birth of the Classical Hollywood cinema in the 1910s and has remained the standard mode of production for cinema.
Single-camera setup
In fluid dynamics, wave setup is the increase in mean water level due to the presence of breaking waves.
Wave setup

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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