Word.ws English Dictionary

thrown up the sponge

thrown up the sponge is the past participle of throw up the sponge.

Meaning of throw up the sponge

Verb

throw up the sponge (third-person singular simple present throws up the sponge, present participle throwing up the sponge, simple past threw up the sponge, past participle thrown up the sponge)

  1. (archaic, idiomatic, intransitive, slang) To give up a contest; to acknowledge defeat; to throw in the towel.
    • But he was too brave a man to throw up the sponge to fate, and had work to do yet.1870, James Russell Lowell, “Lessing”, in Among My Books, Boston, Mass.: Fields, Osgood, & Co., →OCLC, page 330

Questions about thrown up the sponge

What is thrown up the sponge the past participle of?
Thrown up the sponge is the past participle of throw up the sponge.

Words near thrown up the sponge in the dictionary

  1. thrown to the wolves
  2. thrown together
  3. thrown under a bus
  4. thrown up
  5. thrown up one's hands
  6. thrown up the sponge
  7. thrown wobblies
  8. thrownness
  9. throwoff
  10. throwoffs
  11. throwout

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: thrown up the sponge (page history and authors); throw up the sponge (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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