Word.ws English Dictionary

fell away

fell away is the simple past of fall away.

Meaning of fall away

Verb

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

  1. (intransitive) To cease to support a person or cause.
    • After the divorce, all his friends fell away one by one.
  2. (intransitive) To diminish in size, weight, or intensity.
    • One colour falls away by just degrees, and another rises insensibly.1697, Joseph Addison, Essay on Virgil's Georgics
  3. (intransitive) To perish; to vanish; to be lost.
    • How […] can the soul […] fall away into nothing?1711 July 17 (Gregorian calendar), [Joseph Addison; Richard Steele et al.], “FRIDAY, July 7, 1711”, in The Spectator, number 111; republished in Alexander Chalmers, editor, The Spectator; a New...
  4. (intransitive) To slope downward.

Questions about fell away

What is fell away the simple past of?
Fell away is the simple past of fall away.

Words near fell away in the dictionary

  1. fell around
  2. fell asleep
  3. fell asleep in the Lord
  4. fell at the final hurdle
  5. fell at the last hurdle
  6. fell away
  7. fell back
  8. fell back into
  9. fell back on
  10. fell back upon
  11. fell behind

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fell away (page history and authors); fall away (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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