Word.ws English Dictionary

stopped up

stopped up is the simple past and past participle of stop up.

Meaning of stop up

Verb

stop up (third-person singular simple present stops up, present participle stopping up, simple past and past participle stopped up)

  1. To fill a hole or cavity, or block (an opening or passage), as with a plug.
    • So then we […] scratched around and found an old tin washpan, and stopped up the holes as well as we could.1885, Mark Twain, chapter 37, in Huckleberry Finn
  2. (UK) To permanently close or block (a road or path); to legally extinguish a right of way.
  3. To increase the aperture of a photographic lens, moving from an f/stop represented by a higher number to an f/stop represented by a lower number and causing more light to pass into the camera.
    • To stop down means to narrow the aperture; to stop up or open up means to expand it.2002, Kathleen Tracy, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Portrait Photography, →ISBN, page 18

Questions about stopped up

What is stopped up the simple past and past participle of?
Stopped up is the simple past and past participle of stop up.

Words near stopped up in the dictionary

  1. stopped the bleeding
  2. stopped the job
  3. stopped the presses
  4. stopped traffic
  5. stopped two gaps with one bush
  6. stopped up
  7. stopped-clock illusion
  8. stoppedness
  9. stoppedst
  10. stopper
  11. stopper cover

Source and license

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