go back
English
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Verb
[edit]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, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, 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.
Usage notes
[edit]- (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.
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]to return to a place
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to have known each other
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to extend into past time
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to abandon, desert, betray or fail someone or something