Word.ws English Dictionary

gone south

gone south is the past participle of go south.

Meaning of go south

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic) To become unfavorable; to decrease; to take a turn for the worse.
    • I should have walked away from the casino when my luck went south, but I stayed and ended up in the hole.
  2. (intransitive) To make an escape; to disappear.
    • He won! A disbeliever, from childhood, in the frequency of miracles, he gathered up seven hundred and forty dollars and "went south" with it.1929, Peter B. Kyne, The Parson of Panamint and Other Stories, page 197
  3. (slang) To give somebody oral sex.
  4. (slang) To rathole: to take chips off the table in a cash game without exiting the game completely, especially with the intention of limiting losses.

Questions about gone south

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

Words near gone south in the dictionary

  1. gone slap off on
  2. gone snake
  3. gone so far as
  4. gone soft
  5. gone sour
  6. gone south
  7. gone straight
  8. gone strong
  9. gone supernova
  10. gone the distance
  11. gone the entire animal

Source and license

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