dry up

verb

|Updated on: 8 Aug 2018

Examples: dry up in a Sentence

Definition of dry 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

Examples of dry up in a Sentence

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

Recent Examples of dry up from the Web

The collapse of the housing market a decade ago also contributed as the U.S. economy tanked and jobs dried up.

— karl ritter, The Seattle Times, "US, Europe clamp down on migration even as arrivals drop," 9 July 2018
Only when Venezuelan oil dried up in 2016 did things begin to get difficult for him.

— mary anastasia o’grady, WSJ, "Russia in Central America, Again," 8 July 2018
LAS VEGAS - An early rain of three-pointers dried up in a major way and the Milwaukee Bucks weren't able to recover in an 81-78 loss to the Dallas Mavericks in their Las Vegas summer league game on Sunday at Cox Pavilion.

— matt velazquez, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Sterling Brown has more of an offensive role in summer-league loss to Mavericks," 8 July 2018
But interest in dinosaurs dried up during World War II, as did funding to study them, while the world focused on the war and scientists were drafted.

— olivia b. waxman, Time, "The Real Scientific History Behind the Jurassic Park Dinosaurs," 22 June 2018
The old gentleman died after a year or two and that source of income dried up.

— joseph o’neill, The New Yorker, "The First World," 21 June 2018
But with the advent of outfits like Uber and Lyft, which cracked the cab monopoly by enabling consumers to hail rides from any registered driver using smartphones, loans for medallions dried up as the prices plummeted.

— NBC News, "In the shadow of Uber's rise, taxi driver suicides leave cabbies shaken," 7 June 2018
In the early 1950s, a crown jewel of Fort Stockton — Comanche Springs — dried up amid heavy pumping by farmers, most famously Clayton Williams Sr.

— jay root, star-telegram, "New Mexico official: Texans are 'stealing' water and selling it back for fracking," 7 June 2018
Researchers noticed that lake sediment cores bear a regular pattern of ancient lakes drying up and refilling over the course of hundreds of thousands of years—a cycle that hints at cyclical changes in climate.

— jason daley, Smithsonian, "Venus and Jupiter May Meddle With Earth’s Orbit and Climate," 10 May 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'dry up.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.