To go overboard means to do something excessively or to an extreme degree. When your friend decorates their locker with so many photos and stickers that you can barely see the metal underneath, they've gone overboard. When a coach makes the team run twenty extra laps as punishment, that's going overboard. The word captures that moment when enough becomes too much.

Literally, going overboard means falling off a ship into the water, which is obviously dangerous and something sailors desperately tried to avoid. This helps explain why the word carries a sense of losing control or crossing a boundary you shouldn't cross.

You'll hear people use it as friendly criticism: “I think you went a little overboard with the hot sauce” or “Maybe ten pages of rules for our game is going overboard.” It suggests someone had good intentions but lost their sense of proportion. The word also appears in the common phrase to throw something overboard, meaning to abandon an idea or plan completely, just as sailors might toss cargo into the sea during a storm to save the ship.