Word.ws English Dictionary

going down the tubes

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

Meaning of go down the tubes

Verb

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

  1. (US, euphemistic, idiomatic) Synonym of go down the toilet: to fail; to degenerate rapidly.
    • The entire plan went down the tubes when they found they couldn't get strawberries in December.

Questions about going down the tubes

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

Words near going down the tubes in the dictionary

  1. going down the khazi
  2. going down the pan
  3. going down the road
  4. going down the toilet
  5. going down the tube
  6. going down the tubes
  7. going down the wrong pipe
  8. going down the wrong throat
  9. going down the wrong way
  10. going down with
  11. going downhill

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: going down the tubes (page history and authors); go down the tubes (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “going down the tubes.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/going_down_the_tubes. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.