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undergo

verbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˌʌndəˈɡəʊ//
  • United States//ˌʌndɚˈɡoʊ//

To experience; to pass through a phase.

verb

  1. 1

    To experience; to pass through a phase.

    The project is undergoing great changes.

    Many of these classic methods are still used, with some modern improvements. For example, with the aid of special microphones and automated sound detection software, ornithologists recently reported […] that pine siskins (Spinus pinus) undergo an irregular, nomadic type of nocturnal migration.

    The women underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow that happen with brain activity, while being shown images of their grandchild, another child they didn’t know, an adult they didn’t know, and the same-sex parent of their grandchild.

  2. 2

    To suffer or endure; bear with.

    The victim underwent great trauma.

    She had to undergo surgery because of her broken leg.

  3. 3

    obsoleteTo go or move under or beneath.

Etymology

From Middle English undergon, from Old English undergān (“to undergo, undermine, ruin”), equivalent to under- + go. Cognate with Dutch ondergaan (“to undergo, perish, sink”), German untergehen (“to perish, sink, undergo”), Swedish undergå (“to undergo, go through”).

Forms

past tense
underwent
past participle
undergone
present participle
undergoing
third person singular
undergoes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).