Word.ws English Dictionary

deliver the goods

deliver the goods verb: to do what was promised or expected.

Verb

deliver the goods (third-person singular simple present delivers the goods, present participle delivering the goods, simple past and past participle delivered the goods)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) To do what was promised or expected.
    • The government promised a lot, but failed to deliver the goods.
    • […] many drivers who fired those engines in their hey-day have all confirmed to me that they were free-steaming machines, which when pressed could "deliver the goods".1959 February, A. G. Dunbar, “The "Dunalastair I" 4-4-0s of the Caledonian”, in Trains Illustrated, page 85

Forms of deliver the goods

third-person singular presentdelivers the goods
present participledelivering the goods
past participledelivered the goods
pastdelivered the goods

Questions about deliver the goods

What does deliver the goods mean?
Deliver the goods means to do what was promised or expected.
What part of speech is deliver the goods?
Deliver the goods is a verb.
What is the past tense of deliver the goods?
The past tense of deliver the goods is delivered the goods.

Words near deliver the goods in the dictionary

  1. Delium
  2. delived
  3. deliver
  4. deliver over into
  5. deliver over to
  6. deliver the goods
  7. deliver the message to Garcia
  8. deliver up
  9. deliver up to
  10. deliver'd
  11. deliverability

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: deliver the goods (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-deliver the goods.ogg.

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