Word.ws English Dictionary

chokes up

chokes up is the third-person singular simple present indicative of choke up.

Meaning of choke up

Verb

choke up (third-person singular simple present chokes up, present participle choking up, simple past and past participle choked up)

  1. (intransitive) To (temporarily) lose one's power of speech, because of strong emotion.
    • Hearing that song always makes me choke up.
  2. (transitive) To cause (a person) temporarily to lose the power of speech, because of strong emotion.
    • It chokes me up to think about how he died.
  3. (imperative, intransitive, often) To cease talking.
  4. (figuratively, sometimes, transitive) To block up; to cause something to be blocked.
    • The bodies choked up the entrance, barring the egress of those behind.1904, “Chicago's Awful Theater Horror”, in Memorial Publishing Co., page 42
  5. (intransitive) To hold the bat higher (farther from the knob) than is normal.

Questions about chokes up

What is chokes up the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Chokes up is the third-person singular simple present indicative of choke up.

Words near chokes up in the dictionary

  1. chokes off
  2. chokes on
  3. chokes out
  4. chokes the chicken
  5. chokes the luff
  6. chokes up
  7. chokeslam
  8. chokeslammed
  9. chokeslamming
  10. chokeslams
  11. chokest

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chokes up (page history and authors); choke 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: “chokes up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chokes_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.