Word.ws English Dictionary

hem up

hem up verb: to restrain (a person) by grabbing their collar.

Verb

hem up (third-person singular simple present hems up, present participle hemming up, simple past and past participle hemmed up)

  1. (informal, transitive) To restrain (a person) by grabbing their collar.
    • Taking him home she hemmed him up soon as they stepped in the door. Now Tony was a bad dude in the streets but when it came to his mama, he was a punk. A few cuss words on her part had him spilling everything.2006, Kali James, Can U Get Away?, page 17
    • Felicia and Jorge remained inside, observing in horror. Carlos hastily went to where his brother was and grabbed him with all his might. He placed him in a choke-hold and hemmed him up on the brick wall.2014, Tiffany Bolado, The Legacy of Misperception, page 89
  2. (slang, transitive) To arrest or lock up.
    • The last thing you want is to get hemmed up in prison.

Forms of hem up

third-person singular presenthems up
present participlehemming up
past participlehemmed up
pasthemmed up

Questions about hem up

What does hem up mean?
Hem up means to restrain (a person) by grabbing their collar.
What part of speech is hem up?
Hem up is a verb.
What is the past tense of hem up?
The past tense of hem up is hemmed up.

Words near hem up in the dictionary

  1. Helzers
  2. hem
  3. hem and hah
  4. hem and haw
  5. hem in
  6. hem up
  7. hem-
  8. hem-line
  9. Hema
  10. hemabate
  11. hemachate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hem 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: “hem up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hem_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.