Word.ws English Dictionary

all duck or no dinner

all duck or no dinner phrase: all or nothing.

Phrase

all duck or no dinner

  1. (idiomatic) All or nothing.
    • "You know," said Bob, "they'll be pushing their luck getting across the tides of the Irish Sea. It's going to be all duck or no dinner for Captain Carlsen.”2004, Bill Cullen, It's a Long Way from Penny Apples
    • This is what might be termed an all-duck-or-no-dinner approach in which “a univocal meaning” containing no “ anti-liberationist❞ strain is sought.2006, Mark Gray, Rhetoric and Social Justice in Isaiah, page 223

Synonyms of all duck or no dinner

Forms of all duck or no dinner

alternative formduck or no dinner
alternative formno duck, no dinner

Origin of all duck or no dinner

First use appears in Australian English c. 1895.

Questions about all duck or no dinner

What does all duck or no dinner mean?
All duck or no dinner means all or nothing.
What part of speech is all duck or no dinner?
All duck or no dinner is a phrase.

Words near all duck or no dinner in the dictionary

  1. all dressed
  2. all dressed up and no place to go
  3. all dressed up and nowhere to go
  4. all dressed up with no place to go
  5. all dressed up with nowhere to go
  6. all duck or no dinner
  7. all ears
  8. all elbows
  9. all else being equal
  10. all else the same
  11. all ends up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: all duck or no dinner (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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