Word.ws English Dictionary

fat chance

fat chance noun: little or no chance, a low or nonexistent likelihood of occurrence or success; a faint chance.

Noun

fat chance (uncountable)

  1. (colloquial, idiomatic, sarcastic) Little or no chance, a low or nonexistent likelihood of occurrence or success; a faint chance.
    • Fat chance that I’ll ever go back to Swansea.
    • As soon as the word comes out of your mouth […] your own servant is going to size you up as one of those limousine liberals, or whatever epithet they use, who are busy pouring white soul all over the black movement, and would you do as much for the white lower class, for the domestics of the East...1970 June 8, Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's”, in New York Magazine

Questions about fat chance

What does fat chance mean?
Fat chance means little or no chance, a low or nonexistent likelihood of occurrence or success; a faint chance.
What part of speech is fat chance?
Fat chance is a noun.

Words near fat chance in the dictionary

  1. fat cats
  2. fat catshark
  3. fat catsharks
  4. fat cell
  5. fat cells
  6. fat chance
  7. fat choy
  8. fat city
  9. fat client
  10. fat clients
  11. fat comma

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fat chance (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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