fall flat

1. 1.

   fail utterly; collapse

   “The project foundered”

   Synonymsfall throughfounderflop

   Broaderfail

Questions about fall flat

What does fall flat mean?

fall flat means "fail utterly; collapse".

What is another word for fall flat?

Close synonyms include fall through, founder, flop. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is fall flat a common word?

fall flat is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.