Word.ws English Dictionary

up the walls

up the walls prepositional phrase: very busy, swamped.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (Ireland, UK, idiomatic, usually, regarding a workplace) Very busy, swamped.
    • We were up the walls last week and I got ten hours overtime.
    • We didn't go to the restaurant as it was up the walls.

Questions about up the walls

What does up the walls mean?
Up the walls means very busy, swamped.
What part of speech is up the walls?
Up the walls is a prepositional phrase.

Words near up the walls in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: up the walls (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: En-au-up the walls.ogg.

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