pull up short

1. 1.

   stop abruptly

   “The police car pulled up short and then turned around fast”

   Broaderstop

   driving

Questions about pull up short

What does pull up short mean?

pull up short means "stop abruptly".

Is pull up short a common word?

pull up short 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.