Word.ws English Dictionary

going pear-shaped

going pear-shaped is the present participle and gerund 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 going pear-shaped

What is going pear-shaped the present participle and gerund of?
Going pear-shaped is the present participle and gerund of go pear-shaped.

Words near going pear-shaped in the dictionary

  1. going over to the majority
  2. going overboard
  3. going overs
  4. going past
  5. going pear shaped
  6. going pear-shaped
  7. going pearshaped
  8. going phut
  9. going places
  10. going platinum
  11. going poof

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: going 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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