Word.ws English Dictionary

clearing up

clearing up is the present participle and gerund of clear up.

Meaning of clear up

Verb

clear up (third-person singular simple present clears up, present participle clearing up, simple past and past participle cleared up)

  1. (transitive) To clarify, to correct a misconception.
  2. (intransitive) To depart or disappear.
    • All of their symptoms cleared up after the mold was removed.
  3. (intransitive) To become free of certain blemishes.
    • With the new cleanser, his skin cleared up in two weeks.
  4. (intransitive) Of stormy weather, to dissipate, to become calm.
    • Advise him to stay a little longer till the weather clears up.1731 (date written; published 1745), [Jonathan] Swift, Directions to Servants […], London: […] R[obert] Dodsley, […], and M. Cooper, […], →OCLC
  5. (UK, intransitive, transitive) To clean up.
    • Accepting that incidents will always happen, what then matters is how quickly we can clear up the mess, something British Rail was better at. [...] I would turn up as quickly as possible in the on-call Hillman Avenger and assess how quickly we could clear up.2019 October, Ian Walmsley, “Cleaning up”, in Modern Railways, page 43
  6. (intransitive) To pot all of the remaining balls in a single turn.

Questions about clearing up

What is clearing up the present participle and gerund of?
Clearing up is the present participle and gerund of clear up.

Words near clearing up in the dictionary

  1. clearing the air
  2. clearing the decks
  3. clearing the market
  4. clearing the neighborhood
  5. clearing the table
  6. clearing up
  7. clearinghouse
  8. clearinghouses
  9. clearings
  10. clearish
  11. Clearlake

Source and license

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