go to the dogs

English

Etymology

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

Pronunciation

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Verb

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

1. (idiomatic) To decline or deteriorate shockingly.
   • 1874, Thomas Hardy, chapter 42, in Far from the Madding Crowd:

     "[T]he merry old ways of good life have gone to the dogs—upon my carcase, they have!"

   • 1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter L, in The Moon and Sixpence, : Grosset & Dunlap Publishers , →OCLC, page 264:

     Poor devil, he's gone to the dogs altogether. He's got some twopenny-halfpenny job in the medical at Alexandria—sanitary officer or something like that. I'm told he lives with an ugly old Greek woman and has half a dozen scrofulous kids.

   • 2002 February 3, Evan Thomas, "Bring Back the Exploding Cigars" (review of See No Evil by Robert Baer), New York Times (retrieved 17 Feb 2018):

     "The C.I.A. was systematically destroyed by political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism and much more." . . . Baer, who quit the agency four years ago, says he is angry about all this, but he clearly has a good time recounting how the C.I.A. went to the dogs.

Synonyms

• go to pot, go downhill; go to shit (vulgar)

Translations

Further reading

• “go to the dogs”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
• “go to the dogs”, in Collins English Dictionary.