Word.ws English Dictionary

went down the wrong way

went down the wrong way is the simple past of go down the wrong way.

Meaning of go down the wrong way

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic) To go down the trachea (windpipe) in one's throat instead of the esophagus (the tube in the throat for swallowed food and fluids), typically resulting in coughing or choking.
    • She took a big drink of milk and it went down the wrong way. She was coughing for the next two minutes.

Questions about went down the wrong way

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

Words near went down the wrong way in the dictionary

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

Source and license

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