Word.ws English Dictionary

gone to the dogs

gone to the dogs is the past participle 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 gone to the dogs

What is gone to the dogs the past participle of?
Gone to the dogs is the past participle of go to the dogs.

Words near gone to the dogs in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gone 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: “gone to the dogs.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gone_to_the_dogs. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.