start-up

start-up (plural start-ups)

1. Alternative spelling of startup
2. (obsolete) One who comes suddenly into notice; an upstart.
   • c. 1598, William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, Act I, Scene 3,

     That young start-up hath all the glory of my overthrow: if I can cross him any way, I bless myself every way.

3. (obsolete) A kind of high rustic shoe.
   • 1579, Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, London: Hugh Singleton, “Februarie,” Glosse,

     Galage) a startuppe or clownish shoe.

   • 1592, Robert Greene, A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, London: John Wolfe,

     But Hob and Iohn of the countrey they stept in churlishly, in their high startvps […]

   • 1619, Michael Drayton, “The Ninth Eglogue” in Pastorals. Contayning Eglogves, With the Man in the Moone, London: John Smethwicke, reproduced in J. William Hebel (ed.), The Works of Michael Drayton, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1932, p. 564,

     When not a Shepheard any thing that could,

     But greaz’d his start-ups blacke as Autumns Sloe,

• upstart