Word.ws English Dictionary

belly up

belly up adjective: dead or defunct.

Adjective

belly up (not comparable)

  1. (idiomatic) Dead or defunct.
    • After several financial failures, the organization went belly up.

Verb

belly up (third-person singular simple present bellies up, present participle bellying up, simple past and past participle bellied up)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To gather close, or approach eagerly or assertively, as a bar for ordering alcoholic drinks.
    • He bellied up to the bar as soon as he saw a free stool.
    • Belly-up to the bar boys and have a drink with me, […]1926, Cecil Villiers, “Don Juan and the Plaza-Miners”, in The Wails and Tales of a Tropical Tramp, Iquitos: Imp. «La hormiga» […], →OCLC, page 99
  2. (intransitive) To die; to fail or go out of business.
  3. (intransitive) To lay on the back with its belly up.

Forms of belly up

Adjective
alternative formbelly-up
Verb
third-person singular presentbellies up
present participlebellying up
past participlebellied up
pastbellied up

Words formed from belly up

Questions about belly up

What does belly up mean?
Belly up means dead or defunct.
What part of speech is belly up?
Belly up can be an adjective or a verb.

Words near belly up in the dictionary

  1. belly shirts
  2. belly spark
  3. belly sweetbread
  4. belly sweetbreads
  5. belly trap
  6. belly up
  7. belly up to the bar
  8. belly vengeance
  9. belly wash
  10. belly whop
  11. belly whopper

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: belly up (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-belly up.ogg.

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