gum up

present singular third person gums up · participle present gumming up · participle past gummed up · past gummed up

1. intransitiveTo become gooey or gummy.

   Some types of lubricating grease gum up as they age.

2. transitiveTo cause to be gooey or gummy, especially with the effect of obstructing the operation of some mechanism or process.

   Aging grease had gummed up the record changer.

   3 more examples

   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.

   1919, Ring Lardner Sr., chapter 2, in The Real Dope

   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.

   1921, William MacLeod Raine, chapter 21, in Gunsight Pass: How Oil Came to the Cattle Country

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

   2000, Jeffery Deaver, Death of a Blue Movie Star, →ISBN, page 286

3. broadlyidiomatictransitiveTo make non-functional; to interfere with or put into a state of disorder; to ruin.

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

   2010 December 30, Sam Howe Verhovek, “Can Air Travel Be Improved in Bad Weather?”, in New York Times, retrieved 15 Aug 2011

   2 more examples

   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.[…]"

   1918, Henry B[lake] Fuller, On the Stairs, Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Hougton Mifflin Company; Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, →OCLC, part V, section I, pages 148–149

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

   1966 July 29, “Europe: Permanent Watch?”, in Time