Q: I’ve been noticing lately the strange use of “went to go” to form the past tense, as in “went to go see a movie,” “went to go swim,” and “went to go download a video.” I see this as an example of a lack of awareness of how English works.
A: We’d describe the use of “went to go” in your examples as colloquial or informal rather than redundant.
The construction is extremely common in speech, in quoted material, and in casual posts on TikTok and Reddit. But it’s rarely found in edited prose.
In fact, “went to go” often describes a situation in which an action was attempted but failed. That use of the expression has been around for quite some time.
Here’s an example from an article in The New York Times of June 25, 1865—yes, 1865!—about a trial in which a woman accuses a ship’s captain of raping her:
The Times said the woman testified that “being very sleepy, she went to go to bed and could not find the key to her door.” The captain eventually let her in, she said, and he later assaulted her.
In fact, the verb “go” doesn’t mean only to move, travel, or proceed somewhere. It has many other senses, so it’s not necessarily redundant to use the verb twice in the same sentence. For example, “go” used progressively can express the future, as in “I’m going to go to the movies.”
And in an expression like “go see a movie,” the verb “go” appears “often with the sense of motion weakened or absent,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The “go” here is in its base form (infinitive, imperative, subjunctive, etc.), the OED says, “with a following verb also in the base form.” Examples: “go look,” “go find,” “go get,” and so on.
The dictionary has examples for the usage dating back to Anglo-Saxon days, though it says this use of “go” is now colloquial or informal in American English and nonstandard in British English.
As for the use of “went to go + infinitive,” the exact phrase you’re noticing (“went to go find,” “went to go visit,” “went to go buy,” etc.), it appears to have increased noticeably in the late 20th and early 21st century.
Here’s an example from Monica Lewinsky’s testimony before a federal grand jury in Washington about her relationship with President Clinton (Aug. 20, 1998).
Asked about her notorious blue dress, she remarked: “I didn’t really realize that there was anything on it until I went to go wear it again and I had gained too much weight that I couldn’t fit into it.”
And here’s a more recent example from a Nov. 3, 2025, article in The New York Times about the artist Greer Lankton, who died of a cocaine overdose in 1996 at the age of 38.
“I went to go see her in Chicago three months before she died. I think she was desperate to die; that’s all she could talk about” (the jewelry designer Paul Monroe on visiting Lankton, known for her lifelike hand-sewn dolls).
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