Word.ws English Dictionary

DBNO

DBNO is the initialism of down but not out.

Meaning of down but not out

Adjective

down but not out (not comparable)

  1. (idiomatic) Temporarily incapacitated but not permanently defeated.
    • He raised dim eyes to her, eyes that seemed already filmed with death's opaque curtains, but bravely, slowly smiled. "I'm down, but not out, darlin'. That brute of a doctor jolted me hard; I nearly took the count—but I'm—still in the ring.[…]"1907 October, [Hannibal] Hamlin Garland, “Marshall Haney’s Sentence”, in Money Magic: A Novel, New York, N.Y.; London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, →OCLC, page 333

Questions about DBNO

What is DBNO the initialism of?
DBNO is the initialism of down but not out.

Words near DBNO in the dictionary

  1. DBKL
  2. dbl
  3. DBM
  4. DBMS
  5. DBN
  6. DBNO
  7. DBNs
  8. Dbol
  9. DBP
  10. DBPs
  11. DBQ

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: DBNO (page history and authors); down but not out (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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Cite this entry: “DBNO.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dbno. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.