Word.ws English Dictionary

up the wall

up the wall prepositional phrase: crazy, mad.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic) crazy, mad
    • Those noisy children are driving me up the wall.
    • You really are a pain in the arse, aren't you (laugh track)? The PM is going up the wall! Hitting the roof! You can't go around making speeches like that.1980 February 25, Antony Jay, Jonathan Lynn, “Open Government”, in Yes Minister, season 1, episode 1, spoken by Vic Gould (Edward Jewesbury)

Questions about up the wall

What does up the wall mean?
Up the wall means crazy, mad.
What part of speech is up the wall?
Up the wall is a prepositional phrase.

Words near up the wall in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: up the wall (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-up the wall.ogg.

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