off the rails

Discover More

Idioms and Phrases

In an abnormal or malfunctioning condition, as in Her political campaign has been off the rails for months . The phrase occurs commonly with go , as in Once the superintendent resigned, the effort to reform the school system went off the rails . This idiom alludes to the rails on which trains run; if a train goes off the rails, it stops or crashes. [Mid-1800s]

Discover More

Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

The other person Trump is demanding to be investigated is Miles Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff who wrote the famous anonymous op-ed in the New York Times saying that there were people in the administration who were keeping Trump from going off the rails.

From

Mirjam Bikker of the Christian Union party was concerned that next 31 December would end up as "yet another kind of Armageddon and everyone will go completely crazy and go off the rails one more time".

From

Isn’t it nice to have a quaint congressional-procedure subplot while everything else in the world goes off the rails?

From

For someone who has always gone against the grain, and occasionally off the rails, it is hard to imagine what he could do now to diminish his status, however.

From

So you’re not gonna find me on a Sunday morning sleeping until 11 because I got off the rails.

From

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

off-the-rack off-the-record

Browse