Drive someone up the wall means to make someone extremely annoyed. It describes something that irritates you constantly and strongly: noise, other people's habits, endless delays. The idiom is informal; in an essay, people write irritate or annoy instead.
When would you say drive someone up the wall?
Write a sentence — we'll check that the expression fits the situation and suggest what to fix.
The check is taking longer than usual. Your feedback will appear here automatically.
something + drives someone up the wall; it drives me up the wall when + clause
- My neighbour's dog barks all night, and it's driving me up the wall.
- It drives me up the wall when people talk loudly on the phone in the library.
- Three delays in one morning drove all the passengers up the wall.
What changed
First versionThe noise from the building site drives me on the wall.
RevisionThe noise from the building site drives me up the wall.
On the wall may seem logical because the phrase mentions a wall, but in this idiom the person is driven up the wall, as if forced to climb it, so the preposition is only up: drive someone up the wall.
Get on someone's nerves means irritating someone bit by bit. Drive someone up the wall is stronger: it really makes you angry. His humming gets on my nerves, but his loud phone calls drive me up the wall.
Your turn
When my flatmate leaves dirty dishes in the sink for days, it really ___.
Show the answer
drives me up the wall — When a flatmate leaves dishes unwashed for days, it is genuinely infuriating, so drives me up the wall. Cheers me up means makes me feel happier, and nobody is happy about a pile of dirty dishes in the sink.
Write about someone else's habit that really annoys you. Say who does it and where it happens.
It drives me up the wall when my brother leaves wet towels on the bathroom floor.
Learn to use new words without mistakes
Write phrases with the words you are learning. LetsWords shows mistakes in usage and grammar, suggests corrections and explains them, and review helps the words stick.