Word.ws English Dictionary

fat lot

fat lot noun: little or nothing.

Noun

fat lot (uncountable)

  1. (informal, sarcastic) Little or nothing.
    • You're replacing a dead battery with another dead one! Fat lot of good that'll do you!
    • "No, sir, nor to me. I am poor, but I have never ill-used my gift." "A fat lot of use the gift is, then!" said the visitor, rising from his chair.1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “(please specify the chapter number)”, in The Land of Mist (eBook no. 0601351h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, published April 2019

Examples of fat lot in a sentence

  • "Well, there's your friend Silent Simon, and all the police—" / "A fat lot of good they are!" said Ned.1919, J. Storer Clouston, chapter 18, in Simon:
  • You hide it in somebody else's place; somebody who han't got a clue what's going on and couldn't do a fat lot about it if they did.2023, Sally Wainwright, 26:09 from the start, in Happy Valley, season 3, episode 2, spoken by Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire):

Questions about fat lot

What does fat lot mean?
Fat lot means little or nothing.
How do you use fat lot in a sentence?
"Well, there's your friend Silent Simon, and all the police—" / "A fat lot of good they are!" said Ned.
What part of speech is fat lot?
Fat lot is a noun.

Words near fat lot in the dictionary

  1. fat link
  2. fat links
  3. fat lip
  4. fat lips
  5. fat logic
  6. fat lot
  7. fat lute
  8. Fat Man
  9. Fat Man's Misery
  10. fat mice
  11. fat mouse

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fat lot (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-a fat lot.wav.

Cite this entry: “fat lot.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fat_lot. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.