Word.ws English Dictionary

going to great lengths

going to great lengths is the present participle and gerund of go to great lengths.

Meaning of go to great lengths

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic) To make a major effort; to be very careful when doing something, especially to an extreme or excessive degree.
    • The most surprising thing was to discover that each job had its little tricks, peculiarities that had been learned in the experience of years, and one of the really pleasing features was the unlimited patience and kindliness of the chargehands and fitters, who would go to great lengths to teach the...1944 September and October, A Former Pupil, “Some Memories of Crewe Works—I”, in Railway Magazine, page 283

Questions about going to great lengths

What is going to great lengths the present participle and gerund of?
Going to great lengths is the present participle and gerund of go to great lengths.

Words near going to great lengths in the dictionary

  1. going to Cain's
  2. going to Canossa
  3. going to earth
  4. going to extraordinary lengths
  5. going to grass
  6. going to great lengths
  7. going to ground
  8. going to Halifax
  9. going to heck
  10. going to hell
  11. going to hell and back

Source and license

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