Word.ws English Dictionary

hit the skids

hit the skids verb: to fail; to decline.

Verb

hit the skids (third-person singular simple present hits the skids, present participle hitting the skids, simple past and past participle hit the skids)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To fail; to decline.
    • After all, if these measures could've succeeded, they would've been implemented five years ago when the world economy hadn't yet hit the skids.2010, Ganesh Rathnam, Mises Daily, “A Greek Tragedy in the Making”, in Mises Institute
    • A metaverse backlash, already fully rooted, began to bloom. Microsoft’s military contract hit the skids, Disney laid off its entire metaverse team, and even Zuckerberg’s own employees seem not to have much time for the technology.2023 June 6, Ian Bogost, “The Age of Goggles Has Arrived”, in The Atlantic

Forms of hit the skids

third-person singular presenthits the skids
present participlehitting the skids
past participlehit the skids
pasthit the skids

Questions about hit the skids

What does hit the skids mean?
Hit the skids means to fail; to decline.
What part of speech is hit the skids?
Hit the skids is a verb.
What is the past tense of hit the skids?
The past tense of hit the skids is hit the skids.

Words near hit the skids in the dictionary

  1. hit the shelves
  2. hit the shops
  3. hit the shower
  4. hit the showers
  5. hit the silk
  6. hit the skids
  7. hit the spot
  8. hit the stores
  9. hit the streets
  10. hit the trail
  11. hit the wall

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hit the skids (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-hit the skids.ogg.

Cite this entry: “hit the skids.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hit_the_skids. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.