stop up

Idioms and Phrases

Fill a hole or gap, block an opening or passage. For example, We need to stop up the chinks in the walls , or The sink is stopped up; it won't drain . This idiom was at first put simply as stop , the adverb up being added only in the early 1700s.

Example Sentences

"I now put the food away when I go to bed, but in the morning I've found the towel I've used to stop up the gap is pulled out and chewed too."

From BBC

Others have been stopped up on purpose with cotton balls or whatever else came to hand in an emergency after air valves stuck open.

From Washington Post

From there, slowly pull the snake back out and throw away the hair and other gunk that was stopping up your drain.

From Salon

The dam stopped up Haiti’s largest river, the Artibonite, and flooded some of the most fertile farmland in the central plateau.

From Literature

In peat wetlands, inundating the land—and stopping up those weird little chimneys—has the potential to reduce so much CO2 that it would more than compensate for new methane emissions, according to Deverel.

From Scientific American

Related Words

• arrest
• bar
• blockade
• clog
• close
• close off
• cut off
• deter
• halt
• hinder
• hold up
• impede
• intercept
• prevent
• stall
• stop
• thwart