dead-ender
dead-ender noun: one who has no prospects for the future; a loser; a dropout.
Noun
dead-ender (plural dead-enders)
- One who has no prospects for the future; a loser; a dropout.
- One who still holds onto a political position or other viewpoint that is considered outdated or defeated.
- In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and his aides still had a limited view of the insurgency, seeing it as little more than the work of Baathist "dead-enders," criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists who were Al Qaeda followers.2004 05, Harold Wallace Ross, William Shawn, Tina Brown, David Remnick, Katharine Sergeant Angell White, Rea Irvin, Roger Angell, The New Yorker
- Unlike the ideological dead-enders, veterans of the Goldwater campaign, they didn't see much difference between Reagan and Ford—and, other things being equal, they were more inclined to side with the establishment than with the insurgency[…]2015 August 11, Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 734
Forms of dead-ender
| plural | dead-enders |
|---|
Origin of dead-ender
From dead end + -er.
Questions about dead-ender
- What does dead-ender mean?
- Dead-ender means one who has no prospects for the future; a loser; a dropout.
- What part of speech is dead-ender?
- Dead-ender is a noun.
- What is the plural of dead-ender?
- The plural of dead-ender is dead-enders.
Words near dead-ender in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: dead-ender (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:
Cite this entry: “dead-ender.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dead-ender. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.