Word.ws English Dictionary

went down the pan

went down the pan is the simple past of go down the pan.

Meaning of go down the pan

Verb

go down the pan (third-person singular simple present goes down the pan, present participle going down the pan, simple past went down the pan, past participle gone down the pan)

  1. (UK, euphemistic, idiomatic) Synonym of go down the toilet: to fail; to degenerate rapidly.
    • The project would seriously go down the pan if Mrs. Foster weren't here to keep it on the straight and narrow.

Questions about went down the pan

What is went down the pan the simple past of?
Went down the pan is the simple past of go down the pan.

Words near went down the pan in the dictionary

  1. went down south
  2. went down swinging
  3. went down that road
  4. went down the drain
  5. went down the khazi
  6. went down the pan
  7. went down the road
  8. went down the toilet
  9. went down the tube
  10. went down the tubes
  11. went down the wrong pipe

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: went down the pan (page history and authors); go down the pan (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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Cite this entry: “went down the pan.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/went_down_the_pan. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.