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‘She went off the deep end when she heard about her son’s death’Here, what is the meaning of the phrase off the deep end ? Thank you

Inchoateknowledge · Accepted Answer

To go off the deep end means to suddenly become very angry.

Incho

BarbaraPA · Answer

No, not angry. Usually it means to go crazy.

Siggy · Answer

In general terms, to go off the deep end seems to refer to behaving in a extremely emotional way. Thus, you could be very angry, very sad, very boisterous, very violent, and so on. The key element seems to be that someone responds to some event in an unusually strong emotional fashion - almost out of character and far more than you would normally expect.

The origin appears to come from swimming pools. Typically there is a safe shallow end for inexperienced swimmers and a more dangerous deep end for experts. The deep end is dangerous because you cannot touch the bottom and, in some cases, you cannot see how deep it is. So the notion of "dangerous and deep" is used as a metaphor for the extreme feelings someone shows when they go off the deep end.

Siggy

Marius Hancu · Answer

search with
deep
or
end
or
deep end
(one or several of the key words in that idiom)

Marius Hancu · Answer

Grammar Geek<>No, not angry. Usually it means to go crazy.

Angry too

MrPedantic · Answer

In British English it usually implies "to react explosively in a negative way".

MrP

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