Word.ws English Dictionary

dead-end

/ˈdɛdɛnd/

dead-end adjective: going nowhere; blocked. Also the alternative spelling of dead end.

Adjective

dead-end (comparative more dead-end, superlative most dead-end)

  1. (also, figuratively) Going nowhere; blocked.
    • a dead-end street
    • I felt trapped in a dead-end job.

Verb

IPA/dɛdˈɛnd/

dead-end (third-person singular simple present dead-ends, present participle dead-ending, simple past and past participle dead-ended)

  1. (US) To come to a dead-end.
    • Watch out! The road dead-ends in 200 yards and there's nowhere to turn around!
  2. (broadly) To come to nothing; to reach a hopeless situation.
    • Dumas' tangle of unrequited, misplaced and dead-ended love1986 February 1, Michael Bronski, “Mock Homage to Fassbinder's Life & Films”, in Gay Community News, volume 13, number 28, page 6

Also used as

dead-end is also the alternative spelling of dead end.

dead-end meaning in Indonesian

dead-end in Indonesian

blocked
buntu

Examples of dead-end in a sentence

  • Livin' in this house with no furnace, unfurnished / And I'm sick of workin' dead-end jobs with lame pay1999, “Rock Bottom”, in The Slim Shady LP, performed by Eminem:
  • It smashed into the head wall of the 60-foot dead-end tunnel because, as we have seen, the Metropolitan's plans to extend the line south had come to nothing.2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, page 124:
  • So where did all the dead-end jobs come from in the first place?2014 May 25, Tom Clark, “To grasp the dead-end jobs boom, head to the car wash”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:

Forms of dead-end

Adjective
comparativemore dead-end
superlativemost dead-end
alternative formdeadend
Verb
third-person singular presentdead-ends
present participledead-ending
past participledead-ended
pastdead-ended
Noun
pluraldead-ends

Phrases with dead-end

Questions about dead-end

What does dead-end mean?
Dead-end means going nowhere; blocked.
What is dead-end in Indonesian?
Dead-end in Indonesian is buntu. See Dead-end meaning in Indonesian.
How do you use dead-end in a sentence?
Livin' in this house with no furnace, unfurnished / And I'm sick of workin' dead-end jobs with lame pay
What part of speech is dead-end?
Dead-end can be an adjective or a verb.
How do you pronounce dead-end?
Dead-end is pronounced /ˈdɛdɛnd/.

Words near dead-end in the dictionary

  1. dead-clothes
  2. dead-drop
  3. dead-dropped
  4. dead-dropping
  5. dead-drops
  6. dead-end
  7. dead-end street
  8. dead-ended
  9. dead-ender
  10. dead-enders
  11. dead-ending

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead-end (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-dead-end.ogg.

Cite this entry: “dead-end.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dead-end. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.