Word.ws English Dictionary

go by the board

go by the board verb: to fall or to go overboard; to be cast over the side of a ship.

Verb

go by the board (third-person singular simple present goes by the board, present participle going by the board, simple past went by the board, past participle gone by the board)

  1. (idiomatic) To fall or to go overboard; to be cast over the side of a ship.
  2. (idiomatic) To be superseded, rejected, or obliterated; to pass by with little consequence; to amount to nothing.
    • How many cups of tea I drank, because Dora made it, I don’t know. But, I perfectly remember that I sat swilling tea until my whole nervous system, if I had had any in those days, must have gone by the board.1849 May – 1850 November, Charles Dickens, The Personal History of David Copperfield, London: Bradbury & Evans, […], published 1850, →OCLC

Forms of go by the board

third-person singular presentgoes by the board
present participlegoing by the board
pastwent by the board
past participlegone by the board

Questions about go by the board

What does go by the board mean?
Go by the board means to fall or to go overboard; to be cast over the side of a ship.
What part of speech is go by the board?
Go by the board is a verb.
What is the past tense of go by the board?
The past tense of go by the board is went by the board.

Words near go by the board in the dictionary

  1. go both ways
  2. go brrr
  3. go bush
  4. go bust
  5. go by
  6. go by the board
  7. go by the name of
  8. go by the wayside
  9. go bye-bye
  10. go cahoots
  11. go chapter 11

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: go by the board (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: en-au-go by the board.ogg.

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