The phrasal verb eat up is used in five or six different ways, depending on how you classify the uses. But, not all of these uses have to do with eating food.
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Meaning Of Idiom ‘Eat Up’ (phrasal verb)
1. To eat all of something. We might say, “I ate up all the food.
We have to go shopping.”
The word ‘all’ does not have to be used to convey the same meaning.
Examples:
“The children ate up the cookies as soon as they came out of the oven.”
In other words, the children ate every one of the cookies.
“I can’t believe you ate up all the cake. I wanted to have a slice later!”
2. Eat up is also used as a kind of command or request to tell someone to begin eating. It tends to have the connotation of eating quickly and perhaps eating all of what is placed in front of you.
Examples:
“Okay, kids, eat up, then we’ll go to grandma’s house.”
“Here’s the pizza. Eat up, everyone.”
3. Next, to eat up means to use up large amounts of money, time, or something else.
Examples:
“Having children eats up a lot of money.”
“This new job is eating up all my time. I have to bring my work home every day.”
Certain words form frequent collocations with this use of eat up, like like time, money, cash, resources, capital, and profit. Also, something may eat up memory or space on your computer, or eat up bandwidth from your internet.
Example:
“Don’t download that program, it’ll eat up tons of space on your hard drive.”
4. Eat up is used in regards to traveling, especially by car, with distance words such as the word distance, miles, kilometers, etc.
To ‘eat up the miles’ means to travel quickly and easily with little interruption, from one place to another.
Example:
“We ended up driving all night and really ate up the miles.”
5. One can be ‘eaten up’ by a negative emotion such as guilt, shame, remorse, grief, etc. The prepositions by and with are both used.
When you are eaten up by or with an emotion, you feel it so strongly and completely that you can’t think about anything else. The emotion consumes you.
Example:
“He was eaten up by guilt after his drunk driving accident that resulted in his friend injured.”
6. Last, when people really like a particular thing, such as what someone is saying, and want more of it, we might say they are ‘eating it up.’
Example:
“She told her fans a made-up story about her poor upbringing and they ate it up.”
