Word.ws English Dictionary

goes pear-shaped

goes pear-shaped is the third-person singular simple present indicative 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...

Questions about goes pear-shaped

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

Words near goes pear-shaped in the dictionary

  1. goes over someone's head
  2. goes over to the majority
  3. goes overboard
  4. goes past
  5. goes pear shaped
  6. goes pear-shaped
  7. goes pearshaped
  8. goes Pete Tong
  9. goes phut
  10. goes places
  11. goes platinum

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: goes 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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