Word.ws English Dictionary

going bad

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

Meaning of go bad

Verb

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

  1. To spoil, rot, or otherwise become unusable due to age or storage conditions.
  2. to cease to be reputable and instead become delinquent, criminal, immoral, corrupt or poorly behaved.
    Synonyms:
    break bad, go to the bad, turn evil
  3. To become unsafe.

Questions about going bad

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

Words near going bad in the dictionary

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

Source and license

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