Word.ws English Dictionary

sweeping up

sweeping up is the present participle and gerund of sweep up.

Meaning of sweep up

Verb

sweep up (third-person singular simple present sweeps up, present participle sweeping up, simple past and past participle swept up)

  1. (ambitransitive) To clean by sweeping.
    • I'll wash the floor after sweeping up.
  2. (transitive) To transport to shore by waves.
    • The only thing that frees the country from this curse is a favorable wind; this blows them into the sea, where they drown and are swept up on the beach for days afterwards in great heaps1897, Edmondo De Amicis, Maria Hornor Lansdale, Morocco its people and places
  3. (passive, transitive, usually) to overwhelm, to cause to become overly involved in.
    • We got swept up in the excitement.

Questions about sweeping up

What is sweeping up the present participle and gerund of?
Sweeping up is the present participle and gerund of sweep up.

Words near sweeping up in the dictionary

  1. sweeping someone off their feet
  2. sweeping something under the rug
  3. sweeping the board
  4. sweeping the deck
  5. sweeping the floor with someone
  6. sweeping up
  7. sweepingly
  8. sweepingness
  9. sweepings
  10. sweeplike
  11. sweepline

Source and license

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