Word.ws English Dictionary

go pear shaped

go pear shaped is the alternative form of go pear-shaped.

Meaning of go pear-shaped

Verb

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

  1. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK, especially, idiomatic, intransitive) To go awry; to go wrong.
    • After the third attack run I was letting back down to low level, passing through about 100 feet on the way down, when there were two bangs very close together. The whole aircraft shook and things went "pear-shaped" very quickly after that.1983, Jeffrey Ethell, Alfred Price, quoting Bob Iveson, “To Goose Green and Beyond, 26 May – 7 June”, in Air War: South Atlantic (The Air Combat Trilogy; 3), New York, N.Y.: Macmillan Publishing...

Forms of go pear shaped

third-person singular presentgoes pear shaped
present participlegoing pear shaped
pastwent pear shaped
past participlegone pear shaped

Questions about go pear shaped

What is go pear shaped the alternative form of?
Go pear shaped is the alternative form of go pear-shaped.

Words near go pear shaped in the dictionary

  1. go over like a lead zeppelin
  2. go over someone's head
  3. go over to the majority
  4. go overboard
  5. go past
  6. go pear shaped
  7. go pear-shaped
  8. go pearshaped
  9. go pedal
  10. go pedals
  11. go Pete Tong

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: go pear shaped (page history and authors); go pear-shaped (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: “go pear shaped.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/go_pear_shaped. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.