Word.ws English Dictionary

go belly-up

go belly-up verb: to die.

Verb

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

  1. (informal) To die.
  2. (informal) To fail or fold; especially, to be closed or shut down, or go out of business.
    • I was sorry to hear that my favorite little restaurant went belly-up.
    Synonyms:
    go bankrupt

Synonyms of go belly-up

Forms of go belly-up

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

Origin of go belly-up

From the tendency of fish to float upside down when they die.

Questions about go belly-up

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

Words near go belly-up in the dictionary

  1. go bananas
  2. go band for band
  3. go bankrupt
  4. go batshit
  5. go begging
  6. go belly-up
  7. go below
  8. go berserk
  9. go between
  10. go beyond
  11. go beyond the pale

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: go belly-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.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-go belly-up.wav.

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