Meaning
To fail completely, collapse, or cease to exist; said especially of businesses, projects, plans, or schemes that go bankrupt or come to nothing, and also of machines or systems that stop working. Informal in register and often delivered with a note of wry finality. Informal, journalistic idiom, usually applied to commercial failure and often tinged with dark humour. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The standard explanation is the image of a dead fish (or bird) floating upside down, belly uppermost - imagery given by the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms and repeated by Investopedia. The figurative use is not precisely documented in the sources consulted: Investopedia cites John Dos Passos's 1920 line 'Labor's belly up completely' as one of the earliest known uses, and Google Books data show the expression was rare until usage rose sharply from the mid-20th century, when it became a staple of business journalism about bankruptcies. Investopedia also repeats an attribution of the phrase to a 17th-century writer named William Douglass, but this claim is unsourced and chronologically dubious, so it should be treated with caution. In short: the dead-fish imagery is the accepted motivation, but the exact first figurative use is unverified.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- float belly up
- turn belly up
- went belly-up
Usage Examples
- The airline went belly up just weeks after announcing its ambitious expansion plans.
- When the mine closed, half the shops on Main Street went belly up within a year.
- Investors lost millions when the delivery startup's app went belly up.