Word.ws English Dictionary

gone pear-shaped

gone pear-shaped is the past participle 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 gone pear-shaped

What is gone pear-shaped the past participle of?
Gone pear-shaped is the past participle of go pear-shaped.

Words near gone pear-shaped in the dictionary

  1. gone over someone's head
  2. gone over to the majority
  3. gone overboard
  4. gone past
  5. gone pear shaped
  6. gone pear-shaped
  7. gone pearshaped
  8. gone Pete Tong
  9. gone phut
  10. gone places
  11. gone platinum

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gone 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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