Word.ws English Dictionary

fell short

fell short is the simple past 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 fell short

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

Words near fell short in the dictionary

  1. fell pregnant
  2. fell prey
  3. fell runner
  4. fell runners
  5. fell running
  6. fell short
  7. fell sick
  8. fell silent
  9. fell stitch
  10. fell stitches
  11. fell through

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fell 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: “fell short.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fell_short. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.