blow up in one's face
blow up in one's face verb: to fail disastrously.
Verb
blow up in one's face (third-person singular simple present blows up in one's face, present participle blowing up in one's face, simple past blew up in one's face, past participle blown up in one's face)
- To fail disastrously.
- Whether the specific pecking order of the game I let them play today had anything to do with the fact that it blew up in my face after five minutes is a question that can be answered only in empirical terms.1972, James Whittaker, Albert Trieschman, editors, Children Away from Home: A Sourcebook of Residential Treatment
- If I took the risk to speak with my friend and the whole thing blew up in my face, I'd probably feel ashamed and exposed whenever I thought about it for a very, very long time.1999, Dena Rosenbloom, Mary Beth Williams, Barbara E. Watkins, Life after trauma: a workbook for healing
Forms of blow up in one's face
| third-person singular present | blows up in one's face |
|---|---|
| present participle | blowing up in one's face |
| past | blew up in one's face |
| past participle | blown up in one's face |
Questions about blow up in one's face
- What does blow up in one's face mean?
- Blow up in one's face means to fail disastrously.
- What part of speech is blow up in one's face?
- Blow up in one's face is a verb.
- What is the past tense of blow up in one's face?
- The past tense of blow up in one's face is blew up in one's face.
Words near blow up in one's face in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: blow up in one's face (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-blow up in one's face.ogg.
Cite this entry: “blow up in one's face.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/blow_up_in_one%27s_face. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.