Word.ws English Dictionary

dead man walking

dead man walking noun: a condemned prisoner walking to a death chamber or other place of execution.

Noun

dead man walking (plural dead men walking)

  1. A condemned prisoner walking to a death chamber or other place of execution.
    • It was Percy Wetmore who ushered Coffey onto the block, with the supposedly traditional cry of “Dead man walking! Dead man walking here!”1996, Stephen King, The Green Mile
  2. (figuratively) Someone who is soon to die.
    • "So, arrest me," Cummings said. "The fuck do I care? I'm a dead man walking."2010, Peter Corris, Torn Apart, Allen and Unwin, page 231
    • Doctors and scientists considered him a dead man walking. Having calculated that the exposure level was actually hundreds of times the fatal threshold, doctors believed Bugorski would eventually experience total nervous system collapse.2026 May 6, Nicholas Muhoro, “Anatoli Bugorski Survived a 1978 Proton Beam to the Head and Kept Working Like Nothing Happened”, in Skip Boring, archived from the original on 11 May 2026
  3. (figuratively) Someone who is about to face an unavoidable loss (though the person may not realize it yet).
  4. (slang) A multivortex tornado typically appearing in the form of a human figure walking.

Forms of dead man walking

pluraldead men walking

Origin of dead man walking

A phrase traditionally used in U.S. prisons to announce a condemned prisoner being walked to the place of execution. Its use has expanded as a euphemism for anyone facing an impending and unavoidable loss.

Words formed from dead man walking

Questions about dead man walking

What does dead man walking mean?
Dead man walking means a condemned prisoner walking to a death chamber or other place of execution.
What part of speech is dead man walking?
Dead man walking is a noun.
What is the plural of dead man walking?
The plural of dead man walking is dead men walking.

Words near dead man walking in the dictionary

  1. dead loads
  2. dead loss
  3. dead losses
  4. dead mall
  5. dead man
  6. dead man walking
  7. dead man's arm
  8. dead man's brake
  9. dead man's brakes
  10. dead man's fingers
  11. dead man's float

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead man walking (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-dead man walking.wav.

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