balls up

See also: balls-up

English

Etymology 1

From ball up.

Verb

balls up

1. third-person singular simple present indicative of ball up

Etymology 2

From balls + up; see also balls-up.

Verb

balls up (third-person singular simple present ballses up, present participle ballsing up, simple past and past participle ballsed up)

1. (UK, Commonwealth, Ireland, vulgar, intransitive) To make a mess of a situation.
   • 2009, Jan Kjaerstad, The Discoverer, →ISBN:

     He was putting everything he had into it, but he kept ballsing up.

   • 2011, Lesley Thomson, A Kind of Vanishing, →ISBN:

     'We just have to get through without ballsing up

2. (UK, Commonwealth, Ireland, vulgar, transitive) To do something badly. To ruin a job.

   He really ballsed up that paint work. It'll have to be redone!

   • 1977, Mungo MacCallum, Mungo's Canberra, page 142:

     It has got to the ludicrous stage that whenever Snedden makes a speech without actually ballsing something up irrevocably, they tell him he's the greatest thing since Winston Churchill;

   • 2010, A.L. Kennedy, Everything You Need, →ISBN:

     Bearing in mind that if you're teasing but you have to explain it, then you're not teasing, you're just ballsing things up and being a fucking thug.

   • 2023 January 28, Justin Myers, “62 dating green flags that shout ‘this one’s a keeper’”, in The Guardian‎:

     We’re humans, we’re fallible, there is no medal for being right all the time; admitting we ballsed it up is not a weakness, it’s a superpower.

Anagrams

• ball-ups