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threw up one's hands

threw up one's hands is the simple past of throw up one's hands.

Meaning of throw up one's hands

Verb

throw up one's hands (third-person singular simple present throws up one's hands, present participle throwing up one's hands, simple past threw up one's hands, past participle thrown up one's hands)

  1. (intransitive) To raise both hands in the air in an exasperated manner.
  2. (idiomatic, intransitive) To cease an attempt because it is perceived as doomed.
    • I see it warn't a bit of use to try to go ahead—I'd got to throw up my hands.1884 December 10, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) […], London: Chatto & Windus, […], →OCLC

Questions about threw up one's hands

What is threw up one's hands the simple past of?
Threw up one's hands is the simple past of throw up one's hands.

Words near threw up one's hands in the dictionary

  1. threw to the wolves
  2. threw together
  3. threw under a bus
  4. threw under the bus
  5. threw up
  6. threw up one's hands
  7. threw up the sponge
  8. threw wobblies
  9. threwest
  10. threwst
  11. threy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: threw up one's hands (page history and authors); throw up one's hands (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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