Word.ws English Dictionary

hurry up and wait

hurry up and wait verb: to hurry to complete a task or arrive at a destination by a specified time, only for nothing to happen, due to other requirements that have yet to be satisfied.

Verb

hurry up and wait (third-person singular simple present hurries up and waits, present participle hurrying up and waiting, simple past and past participle hurried up and waited)

  1. (humorous, idiomatic) To hurry to complete a task or arrive at a destination by a specified time, only for nothing to happen, due to other requirements that have yet to be satisfied.

Forms of hurry up and wait

third-person singular presenthurries up and waits
present participlehurrying up and waiting
past participlehurried up and waited
pasthurried up and waited

Origin of hurry up and wait

hurry up + wait

Questions about hurry up and wait

What does hurry up and wait mean?
Hurry up and wait means to hurry to complete a task or arrive at a destination by a specified time, only for nothing to happen, due to other requirements that have yet to be satisfied.
What part of speech is hurry up and wait?
Hurry up and wait is a verb.
What is the past tense of hurry up and wait?
The past tense of hurry up and wait is hurried up and waited.

Words near hurry up and wait in the dictionary

  1. hurrs
  2. hurry
  3. hurry hurry has no blessings
  4. hurry sickness
  5. hurry up
  6. hurry up and wait
  7. hurry up the cakes
  8. hurry-furry merger
  9. hurry-scurried
  10. hurry-scurries
  11. hurry-scurry

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hurry up and wait (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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