Word.ws English Dictionary

went down the tubes

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

Meaning of go down the tubes

Verb

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

  1. (US, euphemistic, idiomatic) Synonym of go down the toilet: to fail; to degenerate rapidly.
    • The entire plan went down the tubes when they found they couldn't get strawberries in December.

Questions about went down the tubes

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

Words near went down the tubes in the dictionary

  1. went down the khazi
  2. went down the pan
  3. went down the road
  4. went down the toilet
  5. went down the tube
  6. went down the tubes
  7. went down the wrong pipe
  8. went down the wrong throat
  9. went down the wrong way
  10. went down with
  11. went downhill

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: went down the tubes (page history and authors); go down the tubes (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 tubes.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/went_down_the_tubes. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.