Word.ws English Dictionary

dire straits

dire straits noun: a difficult position or situation.

Noun

dire straits pl (plural only)

  1. (idiomatic, plural, plural-only) A difficult position or situation.
    • After being shipwrecked on the island, we were in dire straits.
    • The painter inconsiderately enough borrowed £30 raised for him with difficulty by the poet, and when Keats was himself in dire straits, resented the expectation that it should be repaid.1817, John Keats, edited by H. Buxton Froman, The Complete Works of John Keats: Poems published in 1817, Volume 1, page xxxix

Examples of dire straits in a sentence

  • Scouts and Indians from the latter province made frequent raids into Georgia, carrying off cattle without which the Floridians would have been in dire straits for meat.1929, Wilbur Henry Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 1774 to 1785, The Most Important Documents Pertaining Thereto, Volume 1, page 50:
  • "I understand the country is in dire straits and has a £2 trillion national debt. […]"2020 December 2, Andy Byford talks to Paul Clifton, “I enjoy really big challenges...”, in Rail, page 50:

Synonyms of dire straits

19 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Forms of dire straits

alternative formdire straights

Origin of dire straits

First use appears c. 1817. See cite below. The phrase stems from nautical terminology, where straits refers to narrow, treacherous passages of water between landmasses, posing serious navigation risks.

Questions about dire straits

What does dire straits mean?
Dire straits means a difficult position or situation.
How do you use dire straits in a sentence?
Scouts and Indians from the latter province made frequent raids into Georgia, carrying off cattle without which the Floridians would have been in dire straits for meat.
What part of speech is dire straits?
Dire straits is a noun.

Words near dire straits in the dictionary

  1. Dirckses
  2. dirdum
  3. dire
  4. Dire Dawa
  5. dire straights
  6. dire straits
  7. dire wolf
  8. dire wolves
  9. direcshun
  10. direcshuns
  11. direct

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dire straits (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: “dire straits.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dire_straits. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.