Word.ws English Dictionary

mop up the ice

mop up the ice verb: to fall many times during a performance.

Verb

mop up the ice (third-person singular simple present mops up the ice, present participle mopping up the ice, simple past and past participle mopped up the ice)

  1. (figure skating) To fall many times during a performance.
    • On the other hand, you may see a skater hit all his triples in practice, then he mops up the ice during the competition.1997, Brian Boitano, Suzanne Harper, Boitano's Edge: Inside The Real World Of Figure Skating, →ISBN, page 90
    • At last year's Canadian championships, she KO'd her long-held Olympic dream when she mopped up the ice in her short program.2007 January 19, Randy Starkman, “Hawker's a scrapper dressed up in sequins”, in Toronto Star

Forms of mop up the ice

third-person singular presentmops up the ice
present participlemopping up the ice
past participlemopped up the ice
pastmopped up the ice

Origin of mop up the ice

From the image of cleaning the ice with one's body.

Questions about mop up the ice

What does mop up the ice mean?
Mop up the ice means to fall many times during a performance.
What part of speech is mop up the ice?
Mop up the ice is a verb.
What is the past tense of mop up the ice?
The past tense of mop up the ice is mopped up the ice.

Words near mop up the ice in the dictionary

  1. mop squeezers
  2. mop stick
  3. mop sticks
  4. mop the floor with someone
  5. mop up
  6. mop up the ice
  7. mop water
  8. mop-and-flop
  9. mop-headed
  10. mop-stick
  11. mop-sticks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mop up the ice (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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