Other forms: overreaching, overreached, overreaches
To overreach is to try for more than you can manage and fail. Overreach yourself, the plan overreached, overreaching ambition.
The failure is built into the word — overreaching is not merely ambitious, it is ambition that has already cost you. In American law, government overreach means acting beyond proper powers. Note the over- meaning beyond.
1verboverreachTo try for more than you can manage and fail.
“The company overreached by opening fifty shops in one year and soon went bankrupt.”
overreach is a failing.
Middle English overrechen means to reach beyond, from over plus reach.
Proto-Indo-European
*Hreyǵ-
Middle English
overrechen — to rise above; to extend beyond or over; to encroach; to catch, overtake; to reach; to obtain wrongfully (?); to take up (a book) to revise it
English, today
overreach
The verb is from Middle English overrechen (“to rise above; to extend beyond or over; to encroach; to catch, overtake; to reach; to obtain wrongfully (?); to take up (a book) to revise it”)overreche, overreiche, (Northern England) overreke, equivalent to over + reach; the noun is derived from the verb or from the phrase to reach over.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA