bubble up

bubble up (third-person singular simple present bubbles up, present participle bubbling up, simple past and past participle bubbled up)

1. (intransitive) To move upward in bubbles or in a way suggesting bubbles.

   The kid was fascinated by the air bubbling up from the aquarium vent.

   • 2011, Courtney Farrell, Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill, →ISBN, page 8:

     So when the well blew, the methane did not bubble up gently.

   • 2013, Karine Nahon, Jeff Hemsley, Going Viral, →ISBN, page 89:

     So while content can bubble up, it can also flow down to many smaller blogs and reach both a large audience and deep into networks.

   • 2013, Rod Stephens, Essential Algorithms: A Practical Approach to Computer Algorithms, →ISBN:

     The fact that item 3 seems to slowly bubble up to its correct position gives the bubblesort algorithm its name.

2. (intransitive) To emerge; to reach the surface.

   Many of the old feelings bubbled up when I met her again.

   • 2008, Diana West -, The Death of the Grown-Up, →ISBN:

     And stifle them we must to play the role, voices steady, manners nonchalant, amid the torrents of profanities and soul-shrinking depravities that bubble up in a mainstream without margins

   • 2013, Achim Nowak, Infectious, →ISBN:

     Notice the feelings that bubble up as you write your “What I Don't Know List.”

   • 2014, Alice Clayton, Mai Tai'd Up, →ISBN, page 92:

     But it didn't all bubble up and become clear until that last . . . week or so.

• (move upward): exestuate

bubble up (plural bubble ups)

1. Alternative form of bubble-up
   • 1992, Congressional Record:

     Then the middle-income tax cut bill that would have made the transfer from the millionaires to the middle class so that we could have some bubble up in our economy, so that we could put some money into the pockets of average working people who have been squeezed, and of course last week the President vetoed that bill.

   • 2005, Lene Arnett Jensen, Reed Larson, Reed W. Larson, New horizons in developmental theory and research, page 87:

     Can we go beyond connections in the form of spillover, or in the form of "trickle down and bubble up"?

   • 2011, Richard G. Hagstrom, The Grass Is Greener: Finding Your True Calling Before Its Too Late, →ISBN:

     So a person may say, “I just can't get this off my mind” or “I have always had this inner urge to do X.” In my view, such repeated bubble ups need expression, and after appropriate thinking about whether such an aspiration uses our Greens or not, properly and sanely implemented.