to string up
14
9.5
- phrasal verb
- /strɪŋ ʌp/
- Offensive
:
ahorcar (a alguien)
- In the old tales, they would string up anyone who dared to challenge the king's authority.
- strung up from a tree
- strung up by their thumbs
- bodies strung up
Examples
-
Get strung up in town square?
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I ought to have the whole bunch of you strung up for cattle-rustling!
-
Now you leave him strung up, yeah?
-
You bring that... thing... ...into town one more time, and I'll have you both strung up.
-
Stay out of the way of the law, or you'll be strung up yourself.
-
The general who conquered this land should have been strung up by his thumbs.
-
Rush suggested we ought to find him and string him up, but it's probably far too late for that—or is it?
Blog text (3) -
He didn't want to get strung up by the Ku Klux.
Fiction book (1993) -
Thaddeus Marcus Adams of Pratt Street in the city of Baltimore had said something that a white lady considered flippant, and for this, he had been beaten to within an inch of his life and strung up on a streetlamp at the border of what everyone back then called Darktown.
Fiction book (2001) -
The villagers decided to string up the bandit as a warning to others who might commit crimes.
Synonyms
524
8.6
To kill a person by tying a rope around their neck and removing support
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The verb 'string' (to bind with cord) combined with 'up' (indicating upward motion or completion) gives a compositional sense of suspending or fastening someone upward, so a learner could infer a meaning related to hanging. However, the specific punitive/lethal sense 'to kill by hanging' is a pragmatic extension beyond merely tying or suspending and may not be fully predictable to a B1 learner, so it is only partially transparent.
Etymology
String up comes from the cruel image of putting a rope like a string around someone's neck and pulling them up to hang them. Because of this literal act, it came to mean 'to kill (someone) by hanging'.