Word.ws English Dictionary

dredge up

dredge up verb: to find by diligently searching, especially from unsavory sources.

Verb

dredge up (third-person singular simple present dredges up, present participle dredging up, simple past and past participle dredged up)

  1. (figuratively) To find by diligently searching, especially from unsavory sources.
    • Where did you dredge up the idea that they didn't know what hospital he was born in?
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see dredge, up.
    • Young, dense seed mussels are dredged up and relaid in more sheltered areas, where they will not be destroyed by storms.1970, Maurice Burton, Robert Burton, The international wildlife encyclopedia, volume 1, page 1713
    • The rush to dredge resulted in engineering problems, with those who had not first ascertained the depth of the wash by boring later dredging up only buckets of water.1997, David Malcolm Grant, Bulls, bears, and elephants: a history of the New Zealand Stock Exchange, page 91

Forms of dredge up

third-person singular presentdredges up
present participledredging up
past participledredged up
pastdredged up

Questions about dredge up

What does dredge up mean?
Dredge up means to find by diligently searching, especially from unsavory sources.
What part of speech is dredge up?
Dredge up is a verb.
What is the past tense of dredge up?
The past tense of dredge up is dredged up.

Words near dredge up in the dictionary

  1. dreckly
  2. dreckness
  3. drecky
  4. dredgable
  5. dredge
  6. dredge up
  7. dredge-up
  8. dredge-ups
  9. dredgeable
  10. dredgeboat
  11. dredgeboats

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dredge 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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