Word.ws English Dictionary

going down the pan

going down the pan is the present participle and gerund of go down the pan.

Meaning of go down the pan

Verb

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

  1. (UK, euphemistic, idiomatic) Synonym of go down the toilet: to fail; to degenerate rapidly.
    • The project would seriously go down the pan if Mrs. Foster weren't here to keep it on the straight and narrow.

Questions about going down the pan

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

Words near going down the pan in the dictionary

  1. going down south
  2. going down swinging
  3. going down that road
  4. going down the drain
  5. going down the khazi
  6. going down the pan
  7. going down the road
  8. going down the toilet
  9. going down the tube
  10. going down the tubes
  11. going down the wrong pipe

Source and license

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