[Ads-l] "Search it up"

[Rich Lowenthal]

In the Times "On Language" column, Sophie Haigney writes about how "the 
kids" are referring to Internet searches these days.

"But the kids these days — Gen Z and Alpha — aren’t talking about 
Googling things. They may still be using Google, but they’re not 
“Googling it.” Instead they’re saying “search it up,” as in: Who is that 
Norwegian soccer player with the long blond hair? Search it up. The “it” 
is dropped if you have a direct object, as when you “search up Erling 
Haaland.”

"The shift toward using this phrasal verb has been profound in the 
youngest generations. A few years ago, a podcast called “A Way With 
Words” interviewed a 13-year-old who described how all her friends were 
using the term; one of the hosts posited that “search up” was being used 
by “zillions of people.” (There is even a PBS KIDS mini-series, which 
started in 2020, called “Search It Up!”) The other day, I spoke to an 
11-year-old named Carson, who told me she uses the phrase exclusively. 
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard one of my friends say, ‘I Googled it,’” 
she said.

"The phrase “search up” was added to the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s 
Dictionary and Thesaurus only in 2024, but it did appear in pre-internet 
times, with a first mention in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1529. 
One example sentence from 1780: “He searched up all the Hebrew copies he 
was able, and burnt them.” Many of the older terms describing the act of 
research had a foot in the physical world: “look up,” “browse” and 
“peruse” all conjure a literal sense of moving through sources in search 
of information."

Full article at
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/magazine/google-it-search-it-up.html

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