go back
English
Verb
go back (third-person singular simple present goes back, present participle going back, simple past went back, past participle gone back)
- (intransitive) To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time.
- We were getting cold so we decided to go back.
- Humans had discovered fire and there was no going back.
- 1909, Archibald Marshall [pseudonym; Arthur Hammond Marshall], chapter I, in The Squire’s Daughter, New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, published 1919, →OCLC:
- He tried to persuade Cicely to stay away from the ball-room for a fourth dance. […] But she said she must go back, and when they joined the crowd again […] she found her mother standing up before the seat on which she had sat all the evening searching anxiously for her with her eyes, and her father by her side.
- 2008, BioWare, Mass Effect (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, via PC, →ISBN, →OCLC, scene: Normandy SR-1:
- Wrex: I escaped with my life. But not before I sank my dagger deep into my father's chest.
Wrex: That... is why I left. And that's why I'll never go back.
- (intransitive, of two or more persons) To have known each other for a certain length of time.
- Bill and I go back to college.
- (intransitive) To extend into past time.
- Bill and I have a friendship that goes back years.
- (intransitive, with "on") To go back on.
Usage notes
- (return): Go back is used chiefly when talking about returning to a place where the speaker is not presently located. Otherwise come back is more common.
Translations
to return to a place
|
to have known each other
|
to abandon, desert, betray or fail someone or something