Word.ws English Dictionary

swept up

swept up is the simple past and past participle 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 swept up

What is swept up the simple past and past participle of?
Swept up is the simple past and past participle of sweep up.

Words near swept up in the dictionary

  1. swept someone off their feet
  2. swept something under the rug
  3. swept the board
  4. swept the deck
  5. swept the floor with someone
  6. swept up
  7. swept wing
  8. swept wings
  9. swept-back
  10. swept-wing
  11. sweptback

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: swept 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.

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Cite this entry: “swept up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/swept_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.