Word.ws English Dictionary

gone down the tubes

gone down the tubes is the past participle 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 gone down the tubes

What is gone down the tubes the past participle of?
Gone down the tubes is the past participle of go down the tubes.

Words near gone down the tubes in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gone 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.

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