dry up

verb

dried up; drying up; dries up

transitive verb

: to cut off the supply of

intransitive verb

1

: to disappear as if by evaporation, draining, or cutting off of a source of supply

2

: to wither or die through gradual loss of vitality

3

: to stop talking

Synonyms

• belt up [British]
• clam up
• dummy up
• hush
• pipe down
• quiet (down)
• shut up

Examples of dry up in a Sentence

sick of her constant complaining, he angrily told her to dry up

Recent Examples on the Web

For instance, certain smaller internet service providers rely on government grants, which raises the question of how sustainable these deployments might be once the funds dry up. —Claudio Saes, Forbes.com, 26 Mar. 2025

Many American medical scientists have found their research dollars dried up which has left me looking to European universities. —Neil Mahto, Baltimore Sun, 24 Mar. 2025

But when food dries up, a change occurs: Individual cells aggregate and form a sort of multicellular slug, which crawls as a single unit and forms fruiting bodies to reproduce. —Viviane Callier, Quanta Magazine, 21 Mar. 2025

Additionally, large swaths that were once used to mine phosphate deposits (an ingredient in fertilizer) have both dried up and made some 80 percent of the land uninhabitable, according to The Guardian. —Stacey Leasca, Travel + Leisure, 20 Mar. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

14th century, in the meaning defined at transitive sense

Rhymes for dry up

• backup
• blowup
• breakup
• buildup
• checkup
• cleanup
• holdup
• hookup
• lineup
• lockup
• makeup
• markup