Word.ws English Dictionary

hems up

hems up is the third-person singular simple present indicative 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 hems up

What is hems up the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Hems up is the third-person singular simple present indicative of hem up.

Words near hems up in the dictionary

  1. hemroid
  2. hems
  3. hems and hahs
  4. hems and haws
  5. hems in
  6. hems up
  7. Hemsby
  8. Hemshin
  9. Hemshinli
  10. Hemshinlis
  11. Hemshins

Source and license

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