Word.ws English Dictionary

dead to rights

dead to rights adverb: with sufficient evidence to establish responsibility definitively.

Adverb

dead to rights (not comparable)

  1. (US, idiomatic) With sufficient evidence to establish responsibility definitively.
    • have someone dead to rights on something
    • Because of the video replay, the ref had him dead to rights on the penalty.

Synonyms of dead to rights

All synonyms of dead to rights

Origin of dead to rights

US, 1854, originally New York City criminal slang, thence entered general use. dead (“completely, utterly”) + to rights (“properly”).

Questions about dead to rights

What does dead to rights mean?
Dead to rights means with sufficient evidence to establish responsibility definitively.
What part of speech is dead to rights?
Dead to rights is an adverb.

Words near dead to rights in the dictionary

  1. dead stops
  2. dead tail
  3. dead time
  4. dead times
  5. dead tired
  6. dead to rights
  7. dead to the world
  8. dead tree
  9. dead tree edition
  10. dead tree editions
  11. dead trees

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead to rights (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 to rights.ogg.

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