Word.ws English Dictionary

hemming up

hemming up is the present participle and gerund 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 hemming up

What is hemming up the present participle and gerund of?
Hemming up is the present participle and gerund of hem up.

Words near hemming up in the dictionary

  1. Hemmes
  2. hemming
  3. hemming and hahing
  4. hemming and hawing
  5. hemming in
  6. hemming up
  7. Hemminger
  8. Hemmingers
  9. Hemmingford
  10. Hemmingham
  11. hemmings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hemming 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.

Last updated:

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