Word.ws English Dictionary

go balls up

go balls up verb: to fail.

Verb

go balls up (third-person singular simple present goes balls up, present participle going balls up, simple past went balls up, past participle gone balls up)

  1. (intransitive, vulgar) to fail
    • The Mayor was desperate to find some kind of happy face to put on the situation should it go balls up.2004, Mike Mignola, Hellboy: Odd Jobs

Forms of go balls up

third-person singular presentgoes balls up
present participlegoing balls up
pastwent balls up
past participlegone balls up

Questions about go balls up

What does go balls up mean?
Go balls up means to fail.
What part of speech is go balls up?
Go balls up is a verb.
What is the past tense of go balls up?
The past tense of go balls up is went balls up.

Words near go balls up in the dictionary

  1. go bad
  2. go bag
  3. go bags
  4. go bail
  5. go ballistic
  6. go balls up
  7. go bananas
  8. go band for band
  9. go bankrupt
  10. go batshit
  11. go begging

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: go balls up (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “go balls up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/go_balls_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.