Word.ws English Dictionary

pileup

pileup is the alternative spelling 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

Forms of pileup

pluralpileups

Origin of pileup

Deverbal from pile up.

Questions about pileup

What is pileup the alternative spelling of?
Pileup is the alternative spelling of pile-up.

Words near pileup in the dictionary

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

Source and license

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