dry up
English
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Verb
[edit]dry up (third-person singular simple present dries up, present participle drying up, simple past and past participle dried up)
- (intransitive) To become dry (often of weather); to lose water.
- Synonyms: desiccate; dehydrate
- Hypernym: dry (sometimes synonymous)
- Coordinate term: dry out (sometimes synonymous)
- I'll go shopping when it dries up.
- Last summer the lake completely dried up.
- 2021 July 20, Jack Healy, Sophie Kasakove, “A Drought So Dire That a Utah Town Pulled the Plug on Growth”, in The New York Times[1], →ISSN, archived from the original on 31 July 2021:
- But those newcomers need water — water that is vanishing as a megadrought dries up reservoirs and rivers across the West. […] Groundwater and streams vital both to farmers and cities are drying up. […] Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah said all but one of the fields on his family’s farm had dried up.
- (transitive) To cause to become dry.
- (intransitive, ambitransitive) To manually dry dishes and utensils.
- (transitive) To deprive someone of (something vital).
- (intransitive) To gradually decrease and eventually cease.
- Synonym: wither away
- When our money dried up, we had to get proper jobs.
- After the stock market crash, the easy financing dried up.
- 2008, Adele, First Love:
- This love has dried up and stayed behind
- (intransitive) To stop talking because one has forgotten what one was going to say.
- (of an actor) To forget one's lines.
- (1930s US slang) To stop talking or drop a topic.
- Synonyms: shut up, clam up; see also Thesaurus:be quiet
- Oh, dry up, you old fuddy-duddy!
- 1930, Norman Lindsay, Redheap, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, →OCLC, page 168:
- "Oh, dry up,' said Arnold morosely.
Usage notes
[edit]- To dry out often means to lose excess or extraneous water, whereas to dry up often means to lose constituent water to a high degree (which is also what desiccate often means).
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]to become dry
|
to cause to become dry