Word.ws English Dictionary

went south

went south is the simple past of go south.

Meaning of go south

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic) To become unfavorable; to decrease; to take a turn for the worse.
    • I should have walked away from the casino when my luck went south, but I stayed and ended up in the hole.
  2. (intransitive) To make an escape; to disappear.
    • He won! A disbeliever, from childhood, in the frequency of miracles, he gathered up seven hundred and forty dollars and "went south" with it.1929, Peter B. Kyne, The Parson of Panamint and Other Stories, page 197
  3. (slang) To give somebody oral sex.
  4. (slang) To rathole: to take chips off the table in a cash game without exiting the game completely, especially with the intention of limiting losses.

Questions about went south

What is went south the simple past of?
Went south is the simple past of go south.

Words near went south in the dictionary

  1. went slap off on
  2. went snake
  3. went so far as
  4. went soft
  5. went sour
  6. went south
  7. went straight
  8. went strong
  9. went supernova
  10. went the distance
  11. went the entire animal

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: went south (page history and authors); go south (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “went south.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/went_south. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.