Word.ws English Dictionary

up the stump

up the stump prepositional phrase: at a loss, puzzled, in a bind.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (informal) At a loss, puzzled, in a bind.
    • Science is up the stump. She can't find out why green sorghum should be so quickly fatal to cattle, says an exchange.1900, Queensland Agricultural Journal, volume 7, page 216
    • He said old Dr. Blank had been attending to him all day, but was “up the stump” and wanted me to help.1907, The American Journal of Clinical Medicine, volume 14, page 662
  2. (Canada, informal) Pregnant.
    • Met him at a dance, a skinny little French-Canadian who shot her a line of bull and put her up the stump before waving goodbye from the troop train.1976, Richard B. Wright, Farthings Fortune's, Macmillan of Canada, →ISBN, page 266
    • "I'm real glad that you told me. When your mom and I got married, it was because she was up the stump, you know that, huh?"1987, Anne Cameron, Stubby Amberchuk & The Holy Grail, Harbour Publishing, →ISBN, page 75

Synonyms of up the stump

Forms of up the stump

alternative formup a stump

Questions about up the stump

What does up the stump mean?
Up the stump means at a loss, puzzled, in a bind.
What part of speech is up the stump?
Up the stump is a prepositional phrase.

Words near up the stump in the dictionary

  1. up the pole
  2. up the proverbial
  3. up the river
  4. up the spout
  5. up the stick
  6. up the stump
  7. up the wall
  8. up the walls
  9. up the wazoo
  10. up the yin-yang
  11. up the ying yang

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: up the stump (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-up the stump.wav.

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