Word.ws English Dictionary

fallen short

fallen short is the past participle of fall short.

Meaning of fall short

Verb

fall short (third-person singular simple present falls short, present participle falling short, simple past fell short, past participle fallen short)

  1. (idiomatic) To be less satisfactory than expected; to be inadequate or insufficient.
    • I did my best, but fell far short of the score cutoff.

Questions about fallen short

What is fallen short the past participle of?
Fallen short is the past participle of fall short.

Words near fallen short in the dictionary

  1. fallen out upon
  2. fallen over
  3. fallen over oneself
  4. fallen pregnant
  5. fallen prey
  6. fallen short
  7. fallen sick
  8. fallen silent
  9. fallen through
  10. fallen through the cracks
  11. fallen to

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fallen short (page history and authors); fall short (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: “fallen short.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fallen_short. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.