Word.ws English Dictionary

choking up

choking up is the present participle and gerund 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 choking up

What is choking up the present participle and gerund of?
Choking up is the present participle and gerund of choke up.

Words near choking up in the dictionary

  1. choking off
  2. choking on
  3. choking out
  4. choking the chicken
  5. choking the luff
  6. choking up
  7. chokingly
  8. chokings
  9. chokka
  10. choklit
  11. choklits

Source and license

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