to go bananas
8
8.1
- idiom
- Informal
:
volverse loco
- The fans went bananas when their team scored the winning goal in the last minute.
- just went bananas
- going bananas here
Now, I mean, we've got the the lefties, you know, going bananas on this stuff now.
- Now, I mean, we've got the the lefties, you know, going bananas on this stuff now.
- Recently, the people in charge of it have gone bananas.
- YouTube Shorts, Snapchat, LinkedIn is a place where you could go bananas, right?
- Even though he's pulled out, they would still be going bananas over it.
- So we have this gal, all of right wing Twitter's kind of going bananas.
- That could be triggered by a trader or it could be triggered by a computer just going bananas.
- So, you know, on the one hand, you got, you know, the Verstappen fans going bananas thinking it was retribution for what had happened earlier in the year.
- He was trying to drop something in to say, look, I have this better technology and I'm going to cause your populace to go bananas.
Examples
-
Everybody's going bananas.
-
And her mother, who was a very strict Italian lady... she went bananas.
-
Oh, the crowd is going bananas!
-
So, get this, guy goes bananas right out in the open for everyone to see.
-
Things are going bananas back there.
Fiction book (2002) -
We opened two weeks ago, and it just went bananas.
Blog text (9) -
Every time the Daily News has a scare headline, people go bananas.
-
She said somebody sent her a few of your scripts, and she went bananas over them.
Fiction book (1999) -
They're going bananas.
-
I've gigged extensively in the UK, and so there's always the added excitement of being abroad in unfamiliar territories in the U.S. I found the crowds in the U.S. are more prone to going bananas at gigs, which is always fun.
Blog text (34)
Synonyms
187
3.5
To suddenly show a strong feeling, often anger
143
7.5
To suddenly become very angry, excited, or surprised
27
7.7
To become very angry and act out of control
22
7.5
Suddenly become very angry
18
4.4
To show sudden strong anger or upset, often like a child
11
9.2
React with strong fear or excitement and lose control
7
5.3
To suddenly get very angry without warning
4
6.7
To suddenly become very angry
2
9.9
To become very angry and act in a wild, out of control way
2
8.6
Suddenly get very angry and show it
1
9.6
To get very excited and act loudly
1
9.9
To suddenly get very angry and speak loudly for a long time
1
9.6
To become too angry or upset about small things
To suddenly become very angry or upset without control
To become suddenly very angry and upset in a dramatic way
Get very upset and confused quickly
To become angry or upset
Antonyms
How Extreme
- Offensive
2
9.9
- Slang
1
9.6
- Informal
8
8.1
- Informal
1
3.9
112
1.0
Surface Forms
Morphology
go + bananas
The verb 'go' meaning 'become' is fully compositional and follows a common English pattern (e.g., 'go mad', 'go crazy'), but the noun 'bananas' here is slang/metaphorical for 'crazy' and is not derivable from the literal fruit meaning. A B1 learner who only knows the literal words is unlikely to infer the idiomatic sense without prior exposure, so the expression is partly transparent (structure) but relies on an opaque lexical metaphor.
Etymology
The idiom go bananas may come from a simple picture: when monkeys find bananas they often act wild and noisy, jumping and grabbing the fruit. So the phrase came to mean 'to become extremely excited, angry, or crazy'.