Word.ws English Dictionary

take a dive

take a dive verb: to decline rapidly.

Verb

take a dive (third-person singular simple present takes a dive, present participle taking a dive, simple past took a dive, past participle taken a dive)

  1. To decline rapidly.
    • Other broad market gauges took even steeper dives, with the Standard & Poor's 500, which includes financial stocks, falling 9.93%.2008 December 1, John Curran, “The Recession Is Made Official — and Stocks Take a Dive”, in Time
  2. (idiomatic) To feign a knockout in order to lose intentionally.
    • I decided there could be a nice bit of irony in a situation where a boxer, with a crown his for the taking, deliberately takes a dive to get revenge on the man he hates, who is betting everything on the boxer's victory.1950, Jules Archer, I Sell What I Write, page 44
    • "You got a fight next weekend. You take a dive in the fourth round, understand?"2012, Gary Lovisi, “Boxing, Babes & Bullets”, in Battling Boxing Stories, Wildside Press LLC, →ISBN, page 165
  3. (idiomatic) To lose or fail intentionally.

Synonyms of take a dive

Forms of take a dive

third-person singular presenttakes a dive
present participletaking a dive
pasttook a dive
past participletaken a dive

Questions about take a dive

What does take a dive mean?
Take a dive means to decline rapidly.
What part of speech is take a dive?
Take a dive is a verb.
What is the past tense of take a dive?
The past tense of take a dive is took a dive.

Words near take a dive in the dictionary

  1. take a decision
  2. take a deep breath
  3. take a dim view of
  4. take a dip
  5. take a dirt nap
  6. take a dive
  7. take a dookie
  8. take a dump
  9. take a fall
  10. take a fall out of
  11. take a fancy to

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: take a dive (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-take a dive.ogg.

Cite this entry: “take a dive.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/take_a_dive. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.