english
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Phrase(s): pile something up
1. to crash or wreck something. • Drive carefully if you don’t want to pile the car up. • The driver piled up the car against a tree. 2. to make something into a heap. • Carl piled all the leaves up and set them afire. • Please pile up the leaves., Phrase(s): pile up
1. Lit. [for things] to gather or accumulate. • The newspapers began to pile up after a few days. • Work is really piling up around here. 2. Fig. [for a number of vehicles] to crash together. • Nearly twenty cars piled up on the bridge this morning.
McGrawhill's American Idioms And Phrasal Verbs
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1. Accumulate, as in The leaves piled up in the yard, or He piled up a huge fortune. In this idiom pile means "form a heap or mass of something." [Mid-1800s] 2. Be involved in a crash, as in When the police arrived, at least four cars had piled up. [Late 1800s]
American Heritage Idioms
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noun ADJ. multiple a multiple pile-up involving a minibus and five cars | eight-vehicle, five-car, etc. | motorway PILE-UP + VERB involve sth | happen, occur PREP. in a/the ~ A young man died in a pile-up on the M1 last night.
Oxford Collocations Dictionary