Word.ws English Dictionary

come unstuck

come unstuck verb: to get into trouble, to have an accident or mishap, to go off the rails.

Verb

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

  1. (UK, idiomatic) To get into trouble, to have an accident or mishap, to go off the rails.
    • “Well, if you must know,” he said, “she's broken the engagement.” This didn't get us any farther. We had assumed as much. You don't go calling people rats if love still lingers. “But it's only an hour or so,” I said, “since I left her outside a hostelry called the ‘Fox and Goose’, and she had just...1960, P[elham] G[renville] Wodehouse, chapter XII, in Jeeves in the Offing, London: Herbert Jenkins, →OCLC
    • It is true that when political philosophers have tried to intervene directly in political life, they have usually come unstuck.2003, David Miller, Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, page 9
    Synonyms:
    come undone

Synonyms of come unstuck

Forms of come unstuck

third-person singular presentcomes unstuck
present participlecoming unstuck
pastcame unstuck
past participlecome unstuck

Questions about come unstuck

What does come unstuck mean?
Come unstuck means to get into trouble, to have an accident or mishap, to go off the rails.
What part of speech is come unstuck?
Come unstuck is a verb.
What is the past tense of come unstuck?
The past tense of come unstuck is came unstuck.

Words near come unstuck in the dictionary

  1. come too
  2. come true
  3. come under
  4. come undone
  5. come unhinged
  6. come unstuck
  7. come up
  8. come up against
  9. come up and bite
  10. come up and bitten
  11. come up from behind

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: come unstuck (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-come unstuck.ogg.

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