gum up (something)

idiom

informal

: to prevent (something) from working or flowing properly

Don't use that paper with the copier; you'll gum it up.

The highway construction has really gummed up traffic.

The bearings are all gummed up with mud.

Examples of gum up (something) in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Screenwriters, who were treated by the front office as the disposable help, got a measure of revenge by portraying their employers as idiots or vulgarians whose sole role in filmmaking was to write the checks and gum up the works. —Thomas Doherty, HollywoodReporter, 20 Apr. 2025

Going after arms sales Top Democrats are also using arms sales to a pair of nation-states Trump visited on his Middle East trip last week in a bid to gum up the president’s plans on the matter. —Al Weaver, The Hill, 20 May 2025

So a future processor, from AMD at least, would probably contain multiple CPU cores connected to several GPU elements that would step in whenever the work is of a type that would gum up a CPU core. —IEEE Spectrum, 30 Dec. 2010

Heat waves can gum up hospitals enough to bring deadly consequences even beyond patients directly afflicted, a new study finds. —Ben Geman, Axios, 20 Feb. 2025