Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
🤐 To stop talking 🔒 To lock in 🚪 Confined inside
shut up

shut up

3 7.2
Kept inside a small place and cannot leave
  • phrasal verb
  • /ʃʌt ʌp/
translation icon : encerrado
  • For Aristotle, nature was a center of properties and a source of strictly delimited activity, shut up within its own order.
  • shut up tight
  • shut up all long

Examples

  • Spent her last three months... shut up in that house.

    Secret Ceremony (1968)

  • I had a touch of tunnel fever at the thought of being shut up for so long.

    Fiction book (1993)

  • I thought her house was all shut up.

    Glorious 39 (2009)

  • We have rooms that have been shut up for as long as I can remember.

    Fiction book (2002)

  • It's been shut up all week long.

    Fiction book (1990)

  • I cried all weekend, shut up in my room.

    Fiction book (1991)

  • The prospect of being shut up inside New Church without Mama, Papa, or Jamie seemed like prison.

    Fiction book (1991)

  • I dread the future, shut up in this isolated spot, dedicated to serve certainly the lowliest subjects of God's kingdom... and dedicated to a belief in their equality with me before God.

    The Keys of the Kingdom (1944)

  • I was then in Germany, where the occasion of the wars that are not over yet over there had called me; and as I was returning to the army from the coronation of the emperor, the beginning of winter detained me in a quarter where, not finding any conversation that might divert me, I remained the whole day shut up alone in a stove-heated room, where I had total leisure to converse with myself about my own thoughts.

    Academic text (1998)

  • The old cabin had been shut up for years, covered in dust and cobwebs.

Synonyms

pent
vsshut up
1 9.1

Kept inside and not able to come out

is the same meaning with no extra nuance
shut-in
vsshut up
1 8.4

Staying mostly at home because of illness, injury, or not wanting to go out

emphasizes confinement without suggesting illness or reluctance
sequestered
vsshut up
7.4

Kept away from other people in a quiet private place

highlights physical inability to leave rather than voluntary seclusion

Antonyms

open
∞ 1.0

Not closed so people or things can go through

How Confined

trapped
4.4
shut up
3 7.2
confined
3.7
contained
4.1

Surface Forms

shut up positive

Morphology

shut + up

The verb 'shut' (to close) plus the particle 'up' suggests a notion of closing completely, so a learner could infer a meaning related to stopping sound (e.g., 'close your mouth'). However, the expression functions as a phrasal verb/imperative with pragmatic force (often rude) that is not fully predictable from the constituents alone, so a B1 learner might guess the general idea but not reliably infer formality/pragmatics and exact usage.

Etymology

Shut up The adjective shut up comes from the picture of being closed inside a place. People were literally shut inside, with doors closed up, so it now means 'kept inside' or 'unable to leave'.