Word.ws English Dictionary

stopping up

stopping up is the present participle and gerund 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 stopping up

What is stopping up the present participle and gerund of?
Stopping up is the present participle and gerund of stop up.

Words near stopping up in the dictionary

  1. stopping times
  2. stopping traffic
  3. stopping train
  4. stopping trains
  5. stopping two gaps with one bush
  6. stopping up
  7. stopping-out
  8. stopping-outs
  9. stoppingly
  10. stoppings
  11. stoppit

Source and license

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