coughing up

1. 1.

   the act of expelling (food or phlegm) by coughing

   Broaderexpulsion

Questions about coughing up

What does coughing up mean?

coughing up means "the act of expelling (food or phlegm) by coughing".

Is coughing up a common word?

coughing up is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.