Word.ws English Dictionary

dead leg

dead leg noun: a blow to the upper thigh, crushing the muscle against the bone and crushing the nerve cluster next to the quadriceps. Also, the resulting injury. Also the alternative form of deadleg.

Noun

dead leg (plural dead legs)

  1. A blow to the upper thigh, crushing the muscle against the bone and crushing the nerve cluster next to the quadriceps. Also, the resulting injury.
    • I kneed you, I said, and I gave him a dead leg.1994, Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke, ha-ha-ha, page 225
    • Knowing all this it can still take you by surprise, like a dead leg or a sudden punch to the solar plexus.2009, Robert Twigger, Dr Ragab's Universal Language, →ISBN
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see dead, leg.

Also used as

dead leg is also the alternative form of deadleg.

Forms of dead leg

pluraldead legs

Questions about dead leg

What does dead leg mean?
Dead leg means a blow to the upper thigh, crushing the muscle against the bone and crushing the nerve cluster next to the quadriceps. Also, the resulting injury.
What part of speech is dead leg?
Dead leg is a noun.
What is the plural of dead leg?
The plural of dead leg is dead legs.

Words near dead leg in the dictionary

  1. dead language
  2. dead languages
  3. dead last
  4. dead leaf
  5. dead leaves
  6. dead leg
  7. dead legs
  8. dead letter
  9. dead letter box
  10. dead letter office
  11. dead letter offices

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead leg (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 leg.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dead_leg. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.