Word.ws English Dictionary

chain up

chain up verb: to put in chains.

Verb

chain up (third-person singular simple present chains up, present participle chaining up, simple past and past participle chained up)

  1. (transitive) To put in chains
    • They've drugged me, beaten and chained me up to the solitary confinement cell bars with metal restraints.1985 December 14, Faron Stone, “Naked Beyond Embarrassment”, in Gay Community News, volume 13, number 22, page 4
    • In the dungeons, Cersei kisses Tyene Sand with poison on her lips. Ellaria is chained up across from her daughter and must watch her die. Cersei lashes out at the world and recreates whatever horror has been done to her to someone else.2017 July 30, Ali Barthwell, “Ice and fire finally meet in a front-loaded episode of Game Of Thrones (newbies)”, in The Onion AV Club
  2. (intransitive, transitive) To put snow chains on the tires of a vehicle.
    • In past winters, we have had to chain up our sedans simply to get up the road to our home.1997 July 27, CharlesW99, “4 Wheel drive on icy roads question”, in rec.autos.4x4 (Usenet)
    • We used to have to chain up the rear wheels on our '77 F250 2WD to get loads of firewood out of remote areas on sticky, slippery roads.1994 July 25, Kong, “hunting truck recommendations”, in rec.hunting (Usenet)

Forms of chain up

third-person singular presentchains up
present participlechaining up
past participlechained up
pastchained up

Questions about chain up

What does chain up mean?
Chain up means to put in chains.
What part of speech is chain up?
Chain up is a verb.
What is the past tense of chain up?
The past tense of chain up is chained up.

Words near chain up in the dictionary

  1. chain tensioner
  2. chain tie
  3. chain ties
  4. chain tower
  5. chain towers
  6. chain up
  7. Chain Valley Bay
  8. chain viper
  9. chain vipers
  10. chain whip
  11. chain whips

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chain 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: “chain up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chain_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.