Word.ws English Dictionary

on the skids

on the skids prepositional phrase: in decline; going downhill; in trouble.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic, informal) In decline; going downhill; in trouble.
    • Entering an election year, no Congress obeys a second-term President whose popularity is on the skids.1938 June 27, “Work Undone”, in Time, archived from the original on 04 May 2008

Questions about on the skids

What does on the skids mean?
On the skids means in decline; going downhill; in trouble.
What part of speech is on the skids?
On the skids is a prepositional phrase.

Words near on the skids in the dictionary

  1. on the shelf
  2. on the sick
  3. on the side
  4. on the side of the angels
  5. on the skew
  6. on the skids
  7. on the slide
  8. on the sly
  9. on the sniff
  10. on the spectrum
  11. on the spin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: on 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.

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

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