Word.ws English Dictionary

piles up

piles up is the third-person singular simple present indicative of pile up.

Meaning of pile up

Verb

pile up (third-person singular simple present piles up, present participle piling up, simple past and past participle piled up)

  1. (transitive) To form a pile, stack, or heap.
    • The kids piled up their boots and coats by the back door.
  2. (idiomatic, intransitive) To collect or accumulate, as a backlog.
    • The requests piled up while she was away.
    Synonyms:
    head up
  3. (intransitive) To sustain a motor vehicle accident; to crash.
    • Nevertheless, if there were no urgent reason for it, I did not fancy driving anything, much less a large, heavily loaded truck, by night along roads which might reasonably be expected to produce a number of hazards. If I were to pile it up, and the odds were that I should, I would lose a lot more...1951, John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, published 1954, page 157

Questions about piles up

What is piles up the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Piles up is the third-person singular simple present indicative of pile up.

Words near piles up in the dictionary

  1. piles of crap
  2. piles of shit
  3. piles on
  4. piles out
  5. piles Pelion on Ossa
  6. piles up
  7. pileum
  8. pileup
  9. pileups
  10. pileus
  11. pilewise

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: piles up (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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