Word.ws English Dictionary

shoot 'em ups

shoot 'em ups is the plural 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

Questions about shoot 'em ups

What is shoot 'em ups the plural of?
Shoot 'em ups is the plural of shoot 'em up.

Words near shoot 'em ups in the dictionary

  1. shooshing
  2. shooster
  3. shoosters
  4. shoot
  5. shoot 'em up
  6. shoot 'em ups
  7. shoot a bird
  8. shoot a rope
  9. shoot an elephant with a BB gun
  10. shoot and protect
  11. shoot around

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shoot 'em ups (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “shoot 'em ups.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shoot_%27em_ups. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.