burn up

phrasal verb

burned up or burnt up; burning up; burns up

: to be destroyed or cause (something) to be destroyed by fire

Most asteroids burn up upon entering the Earth's atmosphere.

Wildfires have been raging across the region burning up acres of forest.

Do we still need these old receipts? No, burn them up.

Examples of burn up in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web The second stage, which is not reusable, delivers the payload into orbit and then eventually falls back to earth and burns up in the atmosphere. —

Phil Diehl, San Diego Union-Tribune, 6 Apr. 2024 There are many standards for measuring what equates to a ton of removed carbon, and several high-profile examples of projects that either burned up in wildfires themselves or were outright fraudulent. —

Lydia Depillis, New York Times, 4 Apr. 2024 Such instances of falling debris are far from uncommon—a large object from space makes an uncontrolled re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere around once a week, with much of the object burning up. —

Will Sullivan, Smithsonian Magazine, 3 Apr. 2024 The company’s Starship craft successfully launched Thursday morning, traveling more than halfway around the world before burning up over the Indian Ocean, The Washington Post reported. —

Tori Latham, Robb Report, 14 Mar. 2024 Two wildfires that are burning up the Texas panhandle have merged to create a super-wildfire that covers more than 1 million acres. —

Chris Morris, Fortune, 1 Mar. 2024 Previously, the state's second-largest was the Big Country fire which burned up 366,000 acres in 1988. —

Li Cohen, CBS News, 28 Feb. 2024 The majority of the debris from the satellite’s reentry will burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, the ESA said, and the remaining debris, which do not contain toxic or radioactive substances, will likely fall into the ocean. —

Conor Murray, Forbes, 21 Feb. 2024 After Tenacity detaches from the ISS and begins its deorbit burn, the cargo module will detach from Tenacity and burn up on reentry, along with its contents. —

Stephen J. Beard, USA TODAY, 26 Feb. 2024

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'burn up.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.