Word.ws English Dictionary

cork up

cork up verb: to enclose in a bottle sealed with a cork.

Verb

cork up (third-person singular simple present corks up, present participle corking up, simple past and past participle corked up)

  1. (transitive) To enclose in a bottle sealed with a cork.
    • Here's a bottle to cork that up in.
    Synonyms:
    cork
  2. (transitive) To block with a cork or something similar.
    • Cork up that pipe.
  3. (imperative, intransitive, slang, usually) Shut up; be quiet.
    • Hey! Cork up in there!
  4. (transitive) To make (someone) be quiet.
    • You gotta cork him up.
    • Then he put the insulted pipe in his pocket, corked himself up with the immense briar, and sneered at Cripps over the top of it.1913, Norman Lindsay, A Curate in Bohemia, Sydney: N.S.W. Bookstall Co., published 1932, page 12
  5. (figuratively, transitive) To suppress an emotion or impulse.
    • He's been corking that anger up for years.
    Synonyms:
    bottle up
  6. (intransitive, transitive) To put cork in a baseball bat; to use a baseball bat with cork in it.
    • I'm sure's been corking up.
    • He must have corked up that bat.

Synonyms of cork up

Forms of cork up

third-person singular presentcorks up
present participlecorking up
past participlecorked up
pastcorked up

Questions about cork up

What does cork up mean?
Cork up means to enclose in a bottle sealed with a cork.
What part of speech is cork up?
Cork up is a verb.
What is the past tense of cork up?
The past tense of cork up is corked up.

Words near cork up in the dictionary

  1. cork tip
  2. cork tipped
  3. cork tips
  4. cork tree
  5. cork trees
  6. cork up
  7. cork wood
  8. cork woods
  9. cork-board
  10. cork-boards
  11. corkable

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cork 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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “cork up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cork_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.