Word.ws English Dictionary

fell foul

fell foul is the simple past of fall foul.

Meaning of fall foul

Verb

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

  1. (archaic, idiomatic) To collide; to conflict with; to attack (+ on, of, upon)
    • If they be any ways offended, […]they fall foul.1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC
  2. (idiomatic) To be defeated or thwarted (by); to suffer (+ of)
    • Sky News fell foul of its own woolly reporting on Tuesday, when it reported "human remains" had been found on Saddleworth Moor. Ever keen to spin a good yarn, they immediately linked the story to moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley - only for the police to emerge seven hours later and...2008, The Guardian, Media Monkey, 4 Aug 2008

Questions about fell foul

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

Words near fell foul in the dictionary

  1. fell down on
  2. fell due
  3. fell flat
  4. fell flat on one's face
  5. fell for
  6. fell foul
  7. fell from grace
  8. fell ill
  9. fell in
  10. fell in line
  11. fell in love

Source and license

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