Word.ws English Dictionary

done for

done for adjective: doomed; without hope of recovery. Also the past participle of do for.

Adjective

done for (not comparable)

  1. Doomed; without hope of recovery.
    • He's done for when they hear that piece of testimony.
    • I'd like to know what would become of us in the next ten minutes. They've got us in a vise. We're done for, Gall.c. 1921 (date written), Karel Čapek, translated by Paul Selver, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama […], Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1923, →OCLC, Act...
  2. See done, for: Punished because of.

Also used as

done for is also the past participle of do for.

Origin of done for

Perhaps from a transposition of fordone (“destroyed, ruined”).

Questions about done for

What does done for mean?
Done for means doomed; without hope of recovery.
What part of speech is done for?
Done for is an adjective.

Words near done for in the dictionary

  1. done did
  2. done dotta
  3. done down
  4. done drugs
  5. done exactly what it said on the tin
  6. done for
  7. done good
  8. done gooseberry
  9. done ill
  10. done in
  11. done it

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: done for (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: “done for.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/done_for. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.