Word.ws English Dictionary

climbing the walls

climbing the walls is the present participle and gerund of climb the walls.

Meaning of climb the walls

Verb

climb the walls (third-person singular simple present climbs the walls, present participle climbing the walls, simple past and past participle climbed the walls)

  1. (idiomatic) To behave in a distressed or frantic manner; to exhibit great agitation.
    • There are purists who climb the walls when German Conductor-Organist-Harpsichordist Karl Richter performs Bach. . . . To them, imagination—and Richter has plenty—is the ultimate transgression.1968 July 5, “Never Like Anyone Else”, in Time

Questions about climbing the walls

What is climbing the walls the present participle and gerund of?
Climbing the walls is the present participle and gerund of climb the walls.

Words near climbing the walls in the dictionary

  1. climbing shoe
  2. climbing shoes
  3. climbing skin
  4. climbing skins
  5. climbing the ladder
  6. climbing the walls
  7. climbing up
  8. climbing up the ladder
  9. climbing wall
  10. climbing walls
  11. climbing wattle

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: climbing the walls (page history and authors); climb the walls (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: “climbing the walls.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/climbing_the_walls. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.