to go belly up
15
5.3
- phrasal verb
- Informal
:
irse a pique
- If the dairy goes belly up, we lose their business and half our income to boot.
- business went belly up
- company goes belly up
- firm went belly up
Things can go belly up because things happen.
- Things can go belly up because things happen.
- When they go belly up, who has to bail them out?
- You know, look at when Bed Bath and Beyond, they went belly up.
- Stand by from the crisis at our southern border to banks going belly up to issues with Russia and China.
- I can talk you through what we did when we faced the worst economy, the worst, a financial meltdown and an auto industry that was about to go belly up.
Examples
-
The mall had gone belly up, and the station now housed a state agency.
Fiction book (1992) -
Georgia Telecom went belly-up when you were up in New York.
-
Great Benefit has gone belly up.
-
In 2010, a large amount of small businesses went belly up, and in 2011, more followed.
Blog text (28) -
I started consulting without a contract, and the company went belly up, leaving me high and dry.
Blog text (25) -
But if you lease it and the company goes belly up, that's their problem, not yours.
-
When the neighborhood changed, the purifier business went belly-up.
Fiction book (1994) -
The orphanage needs $830,000, or it's going belly up.
-
He lost all his equity when the firm went belly-up in the recession of '71.
-
Many small businesses went belly up during the pandemic, leaving their owners devastated.
Synonyms
579
3.9
To fall down suddenly, for example when a person faints or a building breaks
361
5.1
Go out of business and stop operating
87
4.8
To fall suddenly in value, especially for prices or markets
81
5.3
Close a business because it cannot pay its costs
73
3.5
To be unable to pay debts
43
4.4
Fail because of money problems
18
5.5
Plans or hopes suddenly fail and disappear for good
7
7.9
Stop operating because it has run out of money
5
6.8
To fail completely because of problems with plans or projects
1
7.9
To fail completely
To become ruined and fail completely
Antonyms
How Successful
88
3.7
846
2.0
∞
2.7
466
3.2
898
1.0
- Informal
15
5.3
Surface Forms
Morphology
go + belly + up
Although ‘belly up’ evokes a physical image (lying on one’s back, as with a dead animal), the leap from that image to a business or project failing is a metaphorical, culture-specific extension that is not transparently built from ‘go’ + ‘belly’ + ‘up’. A B1 learner who knows the individual words but has not seen the idiom would unlikely predict the meaning ‘to fail/go bankrupt’, so the expression is best treated as opaque.
Etymology
The idiom go belly up may come from watching dead fish or animals float with their belly facing up; when something is 'belly up' it looks clearly dead. So people began to use go belly up for a business or project that fails or 'goes bankrupt'.