Word.ws English Dictionary

dried up

dried up is the simple past and past participle of dry up.

Adjective

dried up (comparative more dried up, superlative most dried up)

  1. Dry; having run out of water or liquid.
  2. Of a person, wrinkled from age.
    • The door was opened by an odd, swarthy, dried-up person of uncertain age, with a dark pilot jacket and brown leather gaiters.1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC

Meaning of dry up

Verb

dry up (third-person singular simple present dries up, present participle drying up, simple past and past participle dried up)

  1. (intransitive) To become dry (often of weather); to lose water.
    • I'll go shopping when it dries up.
    Synonyms:
    desiccate, dehydrate
  2. (transitive) To cause to become dry.
    • The heatwave dried up all the rivers.
    Synonyms:
    desiccate, dehydrate
  3. (ambitransitive, intransitive) To manually dry dishes and utensils.
    • I'll dry up if you wash up.
    Synonyms:
    dry, wipe up
  4. (transitive) To deprive someone of (something vital).
    • The bankruptcy rumor dried up his sales.
  5. (intransitive) To gradually decrease and eventually cease.
    • When our money dried up, we had to get proper jobs.
    Synonyms:
    wither away
  6. (intransitive) To stop talking because one has forgotten what one was going to say.
    • This surprised me so much that I dried up for a moment.

See all 8 meanings of dry up

Forms of dried up

comparativemore dried up
superlativemost dried up

Questions about dried up

What does dried up mean?
Dried up means dry; having run out of water or liquid.
What is dried up the simple past and past participle of?
Dried up is the simple past and past participle of dry up.
What part of speech is dried up?
Dried up is an adjective.

Words near dried up in the dictionary

  1. dried off
  2. dried one's eyes
  3. dried out
  4. dried plum
  5. dried plums
  6. dried up
  7. dried up and blew away
  8. dried up and blown away
  9. dried-fish woman
  10. dried-fish women
  11. dried-up-ness

Source and license

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