Talk:souped-up

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The correct term is "suped-up." "Souped" up is a gag that humorists in car magazines use as an example of someone being ignorant of the subject, eg: "This guy wanted to 'soup-up' his car, and asked me if he should use Tomato or Chicken soup."

I don't doubt these jokes are made though I can't recall hearing them in my years in car clubs. The American Heritage dictionary, for one, has a definition for "soup up". Google finds 417,000 hits including all inflected forms. The "supe-up" spelling has no AHD entry, and a mere 37,700 Google hits. The evidence seems to suggest that this term is correct as it is. — Hippietrail 02:06, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
If "souped-up" is a gag, tell me why every single dictionary I posess (including the OED) contains that spelling and do mention "suped-up" as a spelling at all? The only place I ever see "suped-up" is within the online ramblings of the semi-literate. M0thr4 11:36, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The claim is very much incorrect. The earliest uses available are all "souped-up", not "suped-up" or "supped-up". There is also a question of whether the term originates from "supercharged" or from "soup" (for "a secret concoction"). Since it appears to have been used in reference to horses before engines, the latter may well be the correct etymology, but it's by no means certain.
Alex.deWitte 05:19, 12 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Earliest Usenet uses via Google Groups:[edit]

  • souped-up: fa.unix-wizards - 24 Jul 1981 by day
    For those of you who are worried about whether or not you can legally run somebody's souped-up whatever.c from 32V on your V7 system, I have a list of files which are identical on the V7 and 32V distributions.
  • suped-up: net.chess - 25 Nov 1981 by sri-unix
    Here's an interesting postal game played between Sammy Reshevsky and a suped-up version of Greenblatt's program, running at 8-12 ply in the middlegame (a postal game). Unfortunately, the game had to be terminated abruptly. This has never before been published.
  • souping up: net.movies.sw - 19 Sep 1983 by SSteinberg.SoftArts
    When little Leia was practicing elocution for her first public speech, Luke was probably souping up his first flier with his buddies in Anchorhead.
  • soup-up: net.micro - 14 Oct 1983 by knudsen
    Coco users can buy aftermarket soup-up packages too, but they get in the way of the disk or free RAM.
  • soup up: net.micro.pc - 15 Nov 1984 by Topher Eliot
    This may be true. However, before anyone out there either tries to soup up their own AT, or reaches the conclusion that IBM is playing marketing/demand games, consider whether or not it will run at 18MHz when: ...
  • souping-up: mod.computers.laser-printers - 27 Jan 1986 by laser-lovers
    I was wondering just how cost effective it would be to really soup-up the CPU in a PostScript printer, and what that souping-up would involve.
  • soups up: comp.sys.mac - 8 Mar 1989 by Jeffrey C. Buchsbaum
    A ramdisk really soups up the overall side, and the math helps, but not nearly in a linear fashion.
  • soups-up: rec.arts.anime - 26 Jun 1990 by "Remo Williams, Master of Sinanju"
    BGC #4 is "Revenge Road" and features the guy who soups-up his car with the BGC equivalant of a psycho-mu system.
  • supe up: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy - 25 Jul 1991 by Ray
    No matter how much you "supe up" a A3000UX or NeXT it just doesn't compare.
  • supe-up: rec.games.board - 17 Oct 1992 by Patrick Chester
    It might be noted that you can "supe-up" a LAM with this sort of design.
  • suping up: alt.games.sf2 - 10 Nov 1992 by Bruce A. Haugh
    I think instead of suping up the game to ridiculous speeds and IMO cheesy effects (walking on air, fireballs in the air...get real).
  • supes up: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.flight-sim - 23 Jun 1994 by Darek Richmond
    Is this some special club that by joining it supes up your measly 386dx40???

— Hippietrail 02:18, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the above quotations add to this discussion. If we are to take postings on Usenet as evidence of usage, then we need to start adding all manner of alternative misspellings to the dictionary. M0thr4 11:32, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Etymologies from online dictionaries[edit]

The deeper we look, the more interesting it gets!

  • Microsoft Encarta has an entry for "to soup up" with this etymology:
    [< soup "drug injected into a horse to increase its speed"]
    It does not give a date of first usage.
  • Collins Word Exchange has an entry for "to soup up" but does not give an etymology or a date of first usage.
  • Merriam-Webster has an entry for "to soup up" with this etymology:
    Etymology: soup (drug injected into a racehorse to improve its performance)
    It does not give a date of first usage.
  • Online Etymology Dictionary has this:
    "increase the horsepower of an engine," 1921, probably from soup (n.) in slang sense of "narcotic injected into horses to make them run faster" (1911), influenced by supercharge (v.).
    It gives the appearance of "to supercharge" as 1919.
  • The AHD (via answers.com):
    No etymology is given other than [Slang; c. 1930].

None have an entry for "to supe up" and neither do they list it as a variant or synonym. Interstingly, "to hop up" also has both a drug sense and a performance enhancement sense.

All of this seems to discredit the analysis by Partridge. — Hippietrail 20:04, 14 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

— Hippietrail 8 July 2005 08:12 (UTC)

The current on-line version of the OED lists a quote for soup from 1909 (antedating 1911 above). I have not been able to confirm the Online Etymology Dictionary claim of 1921 for "soup up", but I do have several references from 1925 to 1930. Interestingly, the earliest of these is a September 1925 ad in Popular Mechanics that refers to an airplane engine, not a car. It is not at all clear which usage came first, but "soup" for horses predates both by over a decade, as does "souped up" for "drunk" in US Navy publications.
— Alex.deWitte 06:04, 12 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It is "souped-up" according to The Oxford English Dictionary of Slang (1998, p392 with an origin of US 1931) — M0thr4 11:37, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A couple of minor points--OED 3 also has the 1931 as the earliest citation in the current version. But Oxford dictionaries under no circumstances propose that the earliest citations point to "origin" or "earliest use". Instead, they are earliest available/known sources that may be updated at any time (except for the rare instances when the actual origin is known). In this case, it is clear that the asserted "origin" is at least a decade too late. But if by "origin" you mean that it was originally used in the US (which is what "orig." means in the OED), than it's appropriate.
— Alex.deWitte 06:04, 12 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]


I've removed the etymology for two reasons. First, it appears to be a copyvio, though I can't tell offhand whether it's a direct quote of Partridge or a paraphrase. Second, Wiktionary, being a secondary resource, should rely directly on primary sources (i.e., actual citations), and not merely crib research from other secondary resources without verifying it. If we are able to verify an etymology, then we can publish the information used directly. In either case, reference to another dictionary is neither needed nor appropriate. -dmh 17:59, 7 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Whatever the reason for initial removal, the "second" claim is false or simply inappropriate. The OED is standard for this type of work and Oxford dictionaries don't just cite other dictionaries but they actually list the citations among the source quotes. For example, under soup-up (verb), it has the following citation:
1933 C. K. Stewart Speech Amer. Airman 92 Soup Up, to supercharge.
Under the "miscellaneous uses" of soup (noun), the OED has two citations, both from dictionaries:
1891 Cent. Dict., Soup, a kind of picnic in which a great pot of soup is the principal feature.
1909 Webster's New Internat. Dict. Eng. Lang., Soup, .. any material injected into a horse with a view to changing its speed or temperament. Racing Cant.
"Cribbing" is certainly inappropriate, but citing the source and comparing multiple sources should cause little concern.
— Alex.deWitte 06:04, 12 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]


It appears the BBC prefers "souped-up": "The driverless vehicles range from souped-up SUVs (sports utility vehicles) to hi-tech dune buggies." BBC Online, 8 October 2005

Primary sources[edit]

This one is pretty simple. "Souped-up" is now the accepted spelling of this term, but it's a bastardization of the original spelling of the term, which is "suped-up." It was a drag racing term, and the 'suped' in the original case was short for 'supercharged.' People would take their cars and "supe" them up for drag racing. In the early 70s, my dad did this with one of his cars.

As someone refererenced above, "souped" means absolutely nothing, thus the fact that people who started spelling it that way became the butt of jokes. Then, over time, there were more and more butts, and 'souped' became the most commonly accepted spelling. So that's the story.

Once again, this is a bizarre and unsupported claim. There is absolutely no evidence that "supe-up" or "suped-up" was the early preferred spelling, let alone any proof that the phrase originated from "supercharged". And "somebody above" is clearly wrong--wonderful illustration of amateur citation technique, by the way. Why is this place so full of experts who think they are smarter than all the published lexicographers who do this kind of work for a living? You (whoever "you" are) are absolutely correct--this one is pretty simple: your claim is baseless.
— Alex.deWitte 06:14, 12 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]


Possible Great War (1914-1918) origin[edit]

One of the most notable British aircraft in use during the Great War was the Sopwith F.1, commonly known as the Sopwith Camel. It went through several different incarnations and there were as many as six different engines that were used in the plane. What was arguably the most efficient one for the purpose of the plane as an air combat fighter was made by the French Gnome manufacturer: The Gnome Monosoupape 9B-2 and the 9N. "Monosoupape" is French for "single valve". The designer of the plane, Thomas Sopwith, is recorded as saying that the engine was "one of the greatest single advances in aviation".
Despite contemporary accounts that tell that the plane was notoriously difficult for inexperienced pilots to fly safely, the plane proved to be one of the most effective warplanes of the Allies during the war, especially the variant with the Gnome engines. It would not be surprising to learn that its name had somehow entered common language of the time.
The Military tends to create slang to describe things. Does the term have some origin in the British military of the time - especially the "new" airborne weapons - because the Camel was effectively "souped-up" by the use of the Gnome Monosoupape? It's perfectly credible to me, and there's no difficulty understanding the "soup" spelling.
All that might be conjecture, because other than the use of the engine in that plane, and its performance etc., I have no proof that's what happened. But to me it's at least as plausible as, if not plausible than, the other attempts to explain the origin of the term. Twistlethrop (talk) 04:39, 26 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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