Word.ws English Dictionary

gone postal

gone postal is the past participle of go postal.

Meaning of go postal

Verb

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

  1. (US, informal, intransitive) To become aggressive and erratic, especially due to stress; specifically, to carry out a shooting spree at a workplace environment; also (more generally) to become very angry; to lose one's temper.
    • Violence that spills in from the streets may be less worrisome than the worker rampages, to judge by the attentive audience of personnel managers (and the consultants available for hire) at "A Growing American Phenomenon: Workplace Violence." The symposium was sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service...1993 December 17, Karl Vick, “Violence at work tied to loss of esteem”, in St. Petersburg Times, St. Petersburg, Fla.: The Times Publishing Co., →OCLC, page 4A, column 1
    Synonyms:
    run amok, crash out, Note: All terms are idiomatic unless stated otherwise., blow a fuse, blow a gasket, blow one's stack, blow one's top, cut up nasty, cut up rough, do one's block

Questions about gone postal

What is gone postal the past participle of?
Gone postal is the past participle of go postal.

Words near gone postal in the dictionary

  1. gone Pete Tong
  2. gone phut
  3. gone places
  4. gone platinum
  5. gone poof
  6. gone postal
  7. gone potty
  8. gone public
  9. gone quietly
  10. gone rogue
  11. gone round

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gone postal (page history and authors); go postal (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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