Word.ws English Dictionary

goes by the board

goes by the board is the third-person singular simple present indicative of go by the board.

Meaning of go by the board

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 (idiomatic) To be superseded, rejected, or obliterated; to pass by with little consequence; to amount to nothing.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

Questions about goes by the board

What is goes by the board the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Goes by the board is the third-person singular simple present indicative of go by the board.

Words near goes by the board in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: goes by the board (page history and authors); 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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