English

Alternative forms

• tits up
• titsup

Adjective

tits-up ‎(not comparable)

1. (idiomatic, slang, usually of a woman, usually naked) Lying down face up.
   • 1998, Anna Linzer, Ghost Dancing, Picador, page 39:

     Maybe she knows you and Mary will be taking her home, and that by next week she'll be sleeping under the cool green branches of a giant cedar tree instead of tits-up in some dusty cornfield.

   • 1999, Stephen Rhodes, The Velocity of Money: A Novel of Wall Street (HarperCollins Publishers Inc.), page 253:

     Next thing he remembered was blanking out, and waking to find himself tits-up in the S&P pit, a forest of undulating legs roiling around him.

   • 2005, Lucia St. Clair Robson, Shadow Patriots, Tor/Forge, page 215:

     The two women were naked except for their wigs and their gartered stockings. They both lay tits-up on the floor, facing André and Clinton.

2. (idiomatic, slang, vulgar) Broken; failed; inoperable.
   • 1987, Tom Clancy, Patriot Games, Putnam, page 197:

     The bird went tits-up, take another day or so to fix.

   • 2000, Dewey Lambdin, King's Captain: An Alan Lewrie Naval Adventure, St. Martin's Press, page 66:

     Yeomanry . . . militia forces. . . do I not make major-general by this time next year, I've either gone tits-up. . . or wasn't really tryin'!

   • 2005, Bill Fitzhugh, Pest Control, HarperCollins, page 46:

     Mary said that seventy percent of new businesses failed within the first six months. Another twenty percent went tits-up within the year.

3. (idiomatic, slang, vulgar) Dead.