Word.ws English Dictionary

hemmed up

hemmed up is the simple past and past participle of hem up.

Meaning of hem up

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
  2. (slang, transitive) To arrest or lock up.
    • The last thing you want is to get hemmed up in prison.

Questions about hemmed up

What is hemmed up the simple past and past participle of?
Hemmed up is the simple past and past participle of hem up.

Words near hemmed up in the dictionary

  1. Hemme
  2. hemmed
  3. hemmed and hahed
  4. hemmed and hawed
  5. hemmed in
  6. hemmed up
  7. hemmel
  8. Hemmelgarn
  9. Hemmelgarns
  10. hemmels
  11. hemmer

Source and license

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