Word.ws English Dictionary

development hell

development hell noun: the situation where a project (such as a movie, musical record, or piece of software) is mired in problems that delay its production and release.

Noun

development hell (uncountable)

  1. (colloquial) The situation where a project (such as a movie, musical record, or piece of software) is mired in problems that delay its production and release.
    • The third movie in the trilogy has been in development hell for ten years already! I want to see how the story ends!
    • In Hollywood, it was widely known that to make a deal with Redford was to fall into development hell—script notes, rewrites, and more rewrites—often going nowhere.2013, Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN

Synonyms of development hell

Questions about development hell

What does development hell mean?
Development hell means the situation where a project (such as a movie, musical record, or piece of software) is mired in problems that delay its production and release.
What part of speech is development hell?
Development hell is a noun.

Words near development hell in the dictionary

  1. developing countries
  2. developing country
  3. developings
  4. development
  5. development aid
  6. development hell
  7. development limbo
  8. development mule
  9. development mules
  10. developmental
  11. developmental biologies

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: development hell (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: “development hell.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/development_hell. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.