Word.ws English Dictionary

balls-out

balls-out adjective: extreme; extremely great.

balls-out: extreme; extremely great
Image: R. Routledge, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Adjective

balls-out (not comparable)

  1. (US, idiomatic, slang) Extreme; extremely great.
    • He's making a balls-out run for Motor City by nightfall.1976, CBer's Handy Atlas/Dictionary, page 9, column 2
    • When you're popping babies via multiple partners, the “harem drama” is intense. As one strand of the pronatalist orthodoxy, [Elon] Musk's is very much a balls-out approach.2025 April 26, Jo Ellison, “Make America Pregnant Again”, in FT Weekend (Life & Arts section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 20

Adverb

balls-out (not comparable)

  1. Descriptive of the use of a centrifugal governor at maximum speed, corresponding to full throttle.
  2. (US, idiomatic, slang) With great abandon.
  3. (US, idiomatic, slang) At the fastest possible speed.

balls-out meaning in Bengali

balls-out in Bengali

চরম, অত্যন্ত বেশি, মুক্তভাবে, বাঁধনহীনভাবে, সর্বোচ্চ সম্ভব গতিতে

Origin of balls-out

Usually said to be from the maximum-speed state of a ball governor, whose balls are swung out to the near-horizontal position. Neither balls-out nor balls to the wall is connected with the vulgar sense of balls (“testicles”) except connotationally via folk etymology. (In that vein of apparent vulgar innuendo, see also rock out with one's cock out.)

Questions about balls-out

What does balls-out mean?
Balls-out means extreme; extremely great.
What is balls-out in Bengali?
Balls-out in Bengali is চরম, অত্যন্ত বেশি, মুক্তভাবে. See Balls-out meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is balls-out?
Balls-out can be an adjective or an adverb.

Words near balls-out in the dictionary

  1. balls out
  2. balls to the wall
  3. balls to the walls
  4. balls up
  5. balls-deep
  6. balls-out
  7. balls-to-the-wall
  8. balls-to-the-walls
  9. balls-up
  10. balls-ups
  11. ballsac

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: balls-out (page history and authors); balls-out (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-balls-out.ogg.

Cite this entry: “balls-out.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/balls-out. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.