Word.ws English Dictionary

pile-ups

pile-ups is the plural of pile-up.

Meaning of pile-up

Noun

pile-up (plural pile-ups)

  1. (colloquial) A pile of crashed vehicles due to a traffic accident.
    • Traffic was backed up for miles due to a twelve-car pile-up on the freeway earlier today.
  2. (colloquial) A pile of tackling players.
  3. An accumulation that occurs over time, especially one which is not welcome.
    • If the supervisor deals with daily workload in an orderly way and does not put pressure on the employee about a pile-up of work, then the employee's perception of pressure will be reduced and the employee will not suffer from work pressure stress.2001, Gavriel Salvendy, Handbook of Industrial Engineering: Technology and Operations Management, →ISBN

Questions about pile-ups

What is pile-ups the plural of?
Pile-ups is the plural of pile-up.

Words near pile-ups in the dictionary

  1. pile-driving
  2. pile-drove
  3. pile-on
  4. pile-ons
  5. pile-up
  6. pile-ups
  7. pilea
  8. pileate
  9. pileated
  10. pileated gibbon
  11. pileated gibbons

Source and license

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