Word.ws English Dictionary

adding up

adding up is the present participle and gerund of add up.

Meaning of add up

Verb

add up (third-person singular simple present adds up, present participle adding up, simple past and past participle added up)

  1. (transitive) To take the sum of; to total.
    • Add up the prices and find out how much it will cost.
    Synonyms:
    sum up, tally
  2. (intransitive) To accumulate; to amount to.
    • If you can save even a couple of dollars per day, it will add up to a lot over a year.
    Synonyms:
    accrue, mount up
  3. (idiomatic, intransitive) To make sense; to be reasonable or consistent.
    • His story just doesn't add up. Why would he have been at the restaurant the day before the event?

Questions about adding up

What is adding up the present participle and gerund of?
Adding up is the present participle and gerund of add up.

Words near adding up in the dictionary

  1. adding oil
  2. adding on
  3. adding one's twopenn'orth
  4. adding salt to injury
  5. adding to the list
  6. adding up
  7. adding up to
  8. adding value
  9. Addingham
  10. addings
  11. Addington

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: adding up (page history and authors); add up (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “adding up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/adding_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.