mess up vs upset

mess up

verb
  • To manhandle; beat up; rough up. 

  • To damage; injure. 

  • To make a mess of; to untidy, disorder, soil, or muss. 

  • To botch, bungle; to perform poorly on. 

  • To cause a problem with; to introduce an error or mistake in; to make muddled or confused; spoil; ruin. 

  • To cause (another person) to make unwanted mistakes in a given task, usually through distraction or obnoxious behavior. 

  • To make a mistake; to do something incorrectly; to perform poorly. 

  • To discombobulate, utterly confuse, or confound psychologically; to throw into a state of mental disarray. 

upset

verb
  • To be upset or knocked over. 

  • To shorten (a tire) in the process of resetting, originally by cutting it and hammering on the ends. 

  • To make (a person) angry, distressed, or unhappy. 

  • To tip or overturn (something). 

  • To defeat unexpectedly. 

  • To thicken and shorten, as a heated piece of iron, by hammering on the end. 

  • To disturb, disrupt or adversely alter (something). 

noun
  • An upper set; a subset (X,≤) of a partially ordered set with the property that, if x is in U and x≤y, then y is in U. 

  • The dangerous situation where the flight attitude or airspeed of an aircraft is outside the designed bounds of operation, possibly resulting in loss of control. 

  • An unexpected victory of a competitor or candidate that was not favored to win. 

  • An overturn. 

  • Disturbance or disruption. 

  • An upset stomach. 

adj
  • Angry, distressed, or unhappy. 

  • Feeling unwell, nauseated, or ready to vomit. 

How often have the words mess up and upset occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )