Word.ws English Dictionary

came to grief

came to grief is the simple past of come to grief.

Meaning of come to grief

Verb

come to grief (third-person singular simple present comes to grief, present participle coming to grief, simple past came to grief, past participle come to grief)

  1. (idiomatic) To suffer a disastrous outcome.
    • J. R. R. Tolkien
      These elves and half-elves and wizards, they would come to grief perhaps.

Questions about came to grief

What is came to grief the simple past of?
Came to grief is the simple past of come to grief.

Words near came to grief in the dictionary

  1. came to bat
  2. came to be
  3. came to bed
  4. came to blows
  5. came to fruition
  6. came to grief
  7. came to grips with
  8. came to Jesus
  9. came to life
  10. came to light
  11. came to mind

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: came to grief (page history and authors); come to grief (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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Cite this entry: “came to grief.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/came_to_grief. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.