fall apart
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English
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Audio (General Australian): (file)
Verb
[edit]fall apart (third-person singular simple present falls apart, present participle falling apart, simple past fell apart, past participle fallen apart) (intransitive)
- 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[1]:
- 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.
- (idiomatic) To be emotionally in crisis.
- 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.
- As a result of being addicted to heroin, she was falling apart.
Synonyms
[edit]- (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
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]disintegrate, break into pieces
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be emotionally in crisis
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