Word.ws English Dictionary

dead duck

dead duck noun: one who is in serious danger or trouble.

Noun

dead duck (plural dead ducks)

  1. (idiomatic) One who is in serious danger or trouble.
    • She's a dead duck if she starts flirting with my boyfriend!
  2. (idiomatic) A project that is doomed to failure from the start.
    • The government decision meant that the proposed boycott of South African goods was a dead duck.
    • The "most important suburban line—to Clifton Down, Avonmouth Dock and Severn Beach" has, I fear, been a dead duck for years. (It still exists in 2021)1962 June, “Letters to the Editor: Diesel suburban services in Bristol”, in Modern Railways, page 430

Synonyms of dead duck

Forms of dead duck

pluraldead ducks

Questions about dead duck

What does dead duck mean?
Dead duck means one who is in serious danger or trouble.
What part of speech is dead duck?
Dead duck is a noun.
What is the plural of dead duck?
The plural of dead duck is dead ducks.

Words near dead duck in the dictionary

  1. dead drop
  2. dead dropped
  3. dead dropping
  4. dead drops
  5. dead drunk
  6. dead duck
  7. dead ducks
  8. dead end
  9. dead ends
  10. dead finish
  11. dead first

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead duck (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-dead duck.ogg.

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