Word.ws English Dictionary

take leave of one's senses

take leave of one's senses verb: to go crazy; to stop behaving rationally.

Verb

take leave of one's senses (third-person singular simple present takes leave of one's senses, present participle taking leave of one's senses, simple past took leave of one's senses, past participle taken leave of one's senses)

  1. (idiomatic) To go crazy; to stop behaving rationally.
    • Here I am, with my book and my pencil—the latter not pointed so well as I could wish, but when Christians take leave of their senses, who is to expect that pencils will keep their points?1868 January 4 – June 6, [William] Wilkie Collins, “Second Period. The Discovery of the Truth. (1848–1849.) […] [Fourth Narrative. Extracted from the Journal of Ezra Jennings.]”, in The Moonstone. A...
    • She plainly said that men seemed to take leave of their senses as soon as women were concerned; […]1880, [Henry Brooks Adams], chapter X, in Democracy: An American Novel (Leisure-hour Series; no. 112), New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, →OCLC, page 256

Forms of take leave of one's senses

third-person singular presenttakes leave of one's senses
present participletaking leave of one's senses
pasttook leave of one's senses
past participletaken leave of one's senses

Questions about take leave of one's senses

What does take leave of one's senses mean?
Take leave of one's senses means to go crazy; to stop behaving rationally.
What part of speech is take leave of one's senses?
Take leave of one's senses is a verb.
What is the past tense of take leave of one's senses?
The past tense of take leave of one's senses is took leave of one's senses.

Words near take leave of one's senses in the dictionary

  1. take its toll
  2. take kindly
  3. take L's
  4. take law into one's own hands
  5. take leave
  6. take leave of one's senses
  7. take liberties
  8. take lightly
  9. take long
  10. take lying down
  11. take matters into one's own hands

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: take leave of one's senses (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 leave of one's senses.ogg.

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