Word.ws English Dictionary

turn pear-shaped

turn pear-shaped verb: synonym of go pear-shaped (“to go awry; to go wrong”).

Verb

turn pear-shaped (third-person singular simple present turns pear-shaped, present participle turning pear-shaped, simple past and past participle turned pear-shaped)

  1. Synonym of go pear-shaped (“to go awry; to go wrong”).
    • With the heater going full blast, Sophie and I drive to the all-night garage, and for the price of a coffee I get her life story. Happy as a child, things turned pear-shaped as she entered her teens.2006 January 25, Bernard Hare, “A life in brown and white”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 21 Sep 2014
    • Unfortunately, a lot of the work we do is around trying to encourage leaders and staff in larger organisations to move away from a fear-based culture and one that is driven by 'I don't want to speak up in case I say the wrong thing' or 'what if I experiment with a new offering and it turns...2016 May 28, Andrea Beattie, quoting Stuart Taylor, “What Small Business Can Teach The Big End Of Town About Disruption”, in HuffPost, archived from the original on 08 Jan 2023
    Synonyms:
    go pear-shaped

Synonyms of turn pear-shaped

Forms of turn pear-shaped

third-person singular presentturns pear-shaped
present participleturning pear-shaped
past participleturned pear-shaped
pastturned pear-shaped

Questions about turn pear-shaped

What does turn pear-shaped mean?
Turn pear-shaped means synonym of go pear-shaped (“to go awry; to go wrong”).
What part of speech is turn pear-shaped?
Turn pear-shaped is a verb.
What is the past tense of turn pear-shaped?
The past tense of turn pear-shaped is turned pear-shaped.

Words near turn pear-shaped in the dictionary

  1. turn or burn
  2. turn out
  3. turn over
  4. turn over a new leaf
  5. turn over in one's grave
  6. turn pear-shaped
  7. turn queen's evidence
  8. turn round
  9. turn rusty
  10. turn shoe
  11. turn signal

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: turn pear-shaped (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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