Word.ws English Dictionary

dead men walking

dead men walking is the plural of dead man walking.

Meaning of dead man walking

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
  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.

Questions about dead men walking

What is dead men walking the plural of?
Dead men walking is the plural of dead man walking.

Words near dead men walking in the dictionary

  1. dead melting
  2. dead melts
  3. dead men
  4. dead men can tell no tales
  5. dead men tell no tales
  6. dead men walking
  7. dead men's bells
  8. dead men's fingers
  9. dead men's shoes
  10. dead metaphor
  11. dead metaphors

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead men walking (page history and authors); 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.

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