chum up

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

chum up (third-person singular simple present chums up, present participle chumming up, simple past and past participle chummed up)

1. (idiomatic, informal) To be friendly toward (with or to) someone, especially in an ingratiating way; to form a friendship (with).

   I chummed up with a few of my new work colleagues.

   • 1876 March 16, “Mr. Greville Hodson the Poultry Judge at Home”, in Journal of Horticulture and Cottage Gardener, volume 30, page 221:

     Having met Mr. Hodson many years at various shows, and “chummed up,” as naturally we should have, he invited me to go and see him at his home in Somersetshire.

   • 1919, Frank L. Packard, From Now On‎, Toronto: Copp Clark, Book 3, Chapter 3, p. 163:

     He said he met a stranger in a saloon last night, and that they chummed up together, and started in to make a night of it.

   • 1922, Sinclair Lewis, chapter 26, in Babbitt, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Company, →OCLC, page 309:

     “ […] which would you rather do: be in with a lot of greasy mechanics and laboring-men, or chum up to a real fellow like Lord Wycombe, and get invited to his house for parties?”

   • 2004, Andrea Levy, chapter 42, in Small Island‎, London: Review, page 396:

     ‘Were you in your basha just before you went on guard duty?’
     ‘Yes, sir.’
     ‘With other chaps. Men you’d chummed up with?’
     ‘Yes, sir.’

2. (obsolete, UK, prison slang, transitive) To initiate (a new prisoner) through a ritual involving beating him with sticks and swords, accompanied by music, to extort money from him.[1]
   • 1844 January 13, The Spectator, volume 17, number 811, page 28:

     They have a practice of “chumming up” a new fellow-prisoner—beating him with old swords and staves kept in the prison for the purpose, to exact a fee of a half-crown.

   • 1849, John Brand, Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, revised by Henry Ellis, London: Henry G. Bohn, Volume 2, p. 452,

     Mr. Miller. They are not very nice whom they chum up?

     Boot. Not very; they would as soon chum you up as anybody else.

• make friends