Word.ws English Dictionary

shoot-em-up

shoot-em-up is the alternative spelling of shoot 'em up.

Meaning of shoot 'em up

Noun

shoot 'em up (plural shoot 'em ups)

  1. (idiomatic) A piece of media which depicts considerable gunplay.
    • My wife won't watch this movie; it's a shoot ’em up.
    1. (idiomatic) A video game in which one plays as a character moving and shooting in an autoscrolling two-dimensional world, with emphasis on dodging bullets and predicting enemy movement patterns.
      • Bullet Hell: DoDonPachi exemplifies the term better than any other shoot 'em up, providing a snowstorm of fiery pixels to both simultaneously dodge and eliminate.2011 December 5, Tony Mott, 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die: You Must Play Before You Die, Hachette UK, →ISBN

Forms of shoot-em-up

pluralshoot-em-ups

Questions about shoot-em-up

What is shoot-em-up the alternative spelling of?
Shoot-em-up is the alternative spelling of shoot 'em up.

Words near shoot-em-up in the dictionary

  1. shoot trouble
  2. shoot up
  3. shoot wrestling
  4. shoot-'em-up
  5. shoot-'em-ups
  6. shoot-em-up
  7. shoot-em-ups
  8. shoot-out
  9. shoot-outs
  10. shoot-the-chute
  11. shoot-the-chutes

Source and license

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