Word.ws English Dictionary

going to the dogs

going to the dogs is the present participle and gerund of go to the dogs.

Meaning of go to the dogs

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic, informal) To decline or deteriorate shockingly.
    • "[T]he merry old ways of good life have gone to the dogs—upon my carcase, they have!"1874, Thomas Hardy, chapter 42, in Far from the Madding Crowd

Questions about going to the dogs

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

Words near going to the dogs in the dictionary

  1. going to the bad
  2. going to the bathroom
  3. going to the bow-wows
  4. going to the country
  5. going to the devil
  6. going to the dogs
  7. going to the ends of the earth
  8. going to the ends of the world
  9. going to the goat's house for wool
  10. going to the mat
  11. going to the mats

Source and license

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