Meaning of gum up | Babel Free

Definitions

1. To become gooey or gummy.
   intransitive
2. To cause to be gooey or gummy, especially with the effect of obstructing the operation of some mechanism or process.
   transitive
3. To make non-functional; to interfere with or put into a state of disorder; to ruin.
   broadly, idiomatic, transitive

Equivalents

Examples

“Some types of lubricating grease gum up as they age.”

“Aging grease had gummed up the record changer.”

“I guess they's about 6 other clubs in the American League that if they had seen my name in the dead they wouldn't shed off enough tears to gum up the infield.”

“He knew when the tools were in clay and had become gummed up. He could tell just when the drill had cut into hard rock at an acute angle and was running out of the perpendicular to follow the softer stratum.”

“The timer was digital, so there was no way to physically gum up the mechanism.”

“He had the car pushed to a near-by stable, amidst the mixed emotions of the little crowd, and next day he had it hauled home. / "You were right," he said, when I met him out again in it, a week later. "It was gummed up, so to speak; but it's working like a charm to-day.[…]"”

“Erhard presumably felt it was no time to give his enemies grounds for charging him with gumming up relations with France.”

“In the old days, a storm like this would gum up the entire system.”

CEFR level