Word.ws English Dictionary

tidying up

tidying up is the present participle and gerund of tidy up.

Meaning of tidy up

Verb

tidy up (third-person singular simple present tidies up, present participle tidying up, simple past and past participle tidied up)

  1. To make clean, to make satisfactorily neat.
    • When the long, hot journey drew to its end and the train slowed down for the last time, there was a stir in Jessamy’s carriage. People began to shake crumbs from their laps and tidy themselves up a little.1967, Barbara Sleigh, Jessamy, Sevenoaks, Kent: Bloomsbury, published 1993, →ISBN, page 7

Questions about tidying up

What is tidying up the present participle and gerund of?
Tidying up is the present participle and gerund of tidy up.

Words near tidying up in the dictionary

  1. tidy whities
  2. tidy-up
  3. tidy-ups
  4. tidying
  5. tidying one's sock drawer
  6. tidying up
  7. tidyings
  8. tidyish
  9. tidyness
  10. tidytips
  11. tie

Source and license

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