fall apart

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

fall apart (third-person singular simple present falls apart, present participle falling apart, simple past fell apart, past participle fallen apart) (intransitive)

1. To disintegrate, to break into pieces.

   My old briefcase is falling apart. I'll have to buy a new one.

   • 2011, Tom Fordyce, Rugby World Cup 2011: England 12-19 France‎:

     England's World Cup dreams fell apart under a French onslaught on a night when their shortcomings were brutally exposed at the quarter-final stage.

   • 2024 September 9, “Network News: Robeston train troubles”, in Rail, page 6:

     It investigated extensive damage caused by a Robeston-Westerleigh train after the brake system under one of its wagons fell apart on October 30 2017.

2. (idiomatic) To be emotionally in crisis.

   As a result of being addicted to heroin, she was falling apart.

   • 1980 December 20, Andrea F. Loewenstein, “A Personal Remembrance Of The Saints”, in Gay Community News, volume 8, number 22, page 14:

     At first I used to look at so many of us having fights or crying or staggering around messed up somehow and think, "God, are we fucked up!" but now what I think is that it was a safe place to fall apart in — one of the few. You didn't have to be politically correct or well-behaved; you could be wild or angry or miserable.

3. (idiomatic) To separate.
   • 1599, Nicholas Downton, “The firing and sinking of the stout and warrelike Carack called Las Cinque Llaguas, or, The fiue Wounds, by three tall Ships set foorth at the charges of the right honorable the Erle of Cumberland and his friends”, in Richard Hakluyt, The Second Volume of the Principal Nauigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation, , 2nd edition, London: George Bishop, Ralph Newbery, and Robert Barker, →OCLC, 2nd part, page 200:

     And when my care was moſt, by Gods pꝛouidence onely, by the burning aſunder of our ſpꝛitſaile-yard with ropes and ſaile, and the ropes about the ſpꝛitſaile-yard of the Carack, whereby we were faſt intangled, we fell apart, with burning of ſome of our ſailes which we had then on booꝛd.

   • 1887 November, Linda Villari, “Courmayeur”, in The Leisure Hour, London, page 776, column 2:

     Again the mountains fall apart, and in a wide basin of corn-land and pasture lies the bourgade of La Thuile.

   • 2015 November 3, Mark Cocker, “A tumbleweed of starlings”, in The Guardian‎, London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2015-11-03:

     Others come on behind relentlessly and, in this way, it arrives before me as a tumbleweed of moving birds. Occasionally two of them, newly vanished, suddenly pop back up, all legs and squabbling beak, then they fall apart and resume the stab-and-prise feeding technique that scientists call Zirkeln.

• (break into pieces through being in a dilapidated state): break, break apart, break up, come apart, come apart at the seams, come undone, disintegrate, fall to bits, fall to pieces
• (be emotionally in crisis): crack up

• fally-aparty