What is "backfired"

Usage examples of "backfired".

Fearing that his control was threatened, he ordered large-scale arrests and executions, which backfired and destabilized his regime for months afterward.

Sometimes, however, this lack of caution backfired, because Mercedes would be on all fours hiding behind a lilac bush or some tulips, and she would pop up with her pitching arm going like balls of fire as soon as Harlan entered the invisible but well-marked sphere of her range, and without fail her sudden appearance, plus the accuracy of her pellets, would give the big blubbery man such a start that on several occasions he actually fell down from surprise, and he almost always emerged from these sneak attacks with his heart thundering in a terribly unhealthy manner.

A hands-off policy had backfired, the insurgents had gathered strength.

Two men had been killed and another seriously hurt when one of the rail-mounted port pieces had backfired, blowing apart its removable breech.

In fact, two overcurious cabbies were told that he was a sick man, and that, ironically enough, backfired upon them.

But, this time, her charism-the charism that had terrified her, that she had been running from, that Okami had forced her to face and to manipulate-had backfired.

In the face of the escalating violence in her school, she resigned herself to wearing a bulletproof vest under her artist smocks and even brought in some paintball guns to try to gain the pupils' interest but the latter only backfired into several incidents of drive-by abstract expressionism, and soon she received death threats for not allowing students to fashion crack pipes in ceramics class.

So Hoxworth Kale's first venture into public argument backfired rather badly, but his studies had disclosed to him his ancestors, so that no matter how witty the gibes against missionaries became, he knew what the facts were, and this knowledge, in the subtle way that knowledge has, fortified him in many ways and made him a stronger man.

Humans died by the droves, taking the elves with them as their practice of bolstering their numbers by hybridizing with humanity backfired.

It was believed their practice of hybridizing with humans to bolster their numbers backfired, making them susceptible to the Angel virus.

Anyhow, he decided, if I instigated it and it backfired, one can imagine where I'd be: in Protective Custody in Eastern General Gouvernement, if not in a chamber being squirted with Zyklon B hydrogen cyanide gas.

If this backfired, Werst could always join her in a fulfilling career in musical theater.

I decided that maybe the nicotine patch she was wearing had backfired or something, sending pure, unadulterated carbon monoxide into her bloodstream.

Harry attempted a Leg-Locker Curse that backfired off the wall be­.

The manipulation of the human desire for peace had backfired, their collective rage turning the enemy back, though at best it was a Pyrrhic victory.