Word.ws English Dictionary

going backwards

going backwards is the present participle and gerund of go backwards.

Meaning of go backwards

Verb

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

  1. To decline or deteriorate; to get worse.
  2. (obsolete, slang) To defecate; to visit the privy.
    • [O]ne day he expressed his desire of going backwards with such natural imitation of his purpose, that every body in the room firmly believed he had actually overshot himself, and fortified their nostrils accordingly.1751, [Tobias] Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), London: Harrison and Co., […], →OCLC

Questions about going backwards

What is going backwards the present participle and gerund of?
Going backwards is the present participle and gerund of go backwards.

Words near going backwards in the dictionary

  1. going back in time
  2. going back on
  3. going back to
  4. going back to the drawing board
  5. going back to the tools
  6. going backwards
  7. going bad
  8. going ballistic
  9. going balls up
  10. going bananas
  11. going bankrupt

Source and license

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