Word.ws English Dictionary

hiding to nothing

hiding to nothing noun: a situation in which victory has little or no value, but defeat has a huge cost.

Noun

hiding to nothing (plural hidings to nothing)

  1. (UK, idiomatic, informal) A situation in which victory has little or no value, but defeat has a huge cost.
    • It would have been madness to encourage them to back the mare : in fact I was on a hiding to nothing whatever happened.1915, James Forman Sloan, A. Dick Luckman, Tod Sloan, page 245
    • No legitimate excuse for introduction existed, or could exist, and the odds looked like a hiding to nothing should Bayard attempt to force a meeting […]1931, The Atlantic Monthly, Making of America Project, page 60

Examples of hiding to nothing in a sentence

  • It is a nasty situation and DFR knows that he is on a good hiding to nothing.1989, Dave Graves, A layman's guide to United Kingdom air traffic control, page 76:
  • Company directors are on a hiding to nothing when it comes to trusting their reputations to the accounting statements for which they are responsible.2003, Frank L. Clarke with G. W. Dean and Kyle Gaius Oliver, Corporate collapse: accounting, regulatory and ethical failure, page 39:

Forms of hiding to nothing

pluralhidings to nothing

Origin of hiding to nothing

From horse racing, hiding (“beating”); to (“as used to express gambling odds”), e.g., 6 to 1. Literally, the phrase can be described as to bet on a contest whose outcome is at worst a beating, or at best nothing. A heavily favoured team in a sporting contest earns no credit for victory, but is shamed by defeat; this team is said to be on a hiding to nothing.

Questions about hiding to nothing

What does hiding to nothing mean?
Hiding to nothing means a situation in which victory has little or no value, but defeat has a huge cost.
How do you use hiding to nothing in a sentence?
It is a nasty situation and DFR knows that he is on a good hiding to nothing.
What part of speech is hiding to nothing?
Hiding to nothing is a noun.
What is the plural of hiding to nothing?
The plural of hiding to nothing is hidings to nothing.

Words near hiding to nothing in the dictionary

  1. hiding the ball
  2. hiding the salami
  3. hiding the sausage
  4. hiding the weenie
  5. hiding the wienie
  6. hiding to nothing
  7. hiding-place
  8. hiding-places
  9. hidingly
  10. hidingplace
  11. hidingplaces

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hiding to nothing (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-hiding to nothing.ogg.

Cite this entry: “hiding to nothing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hiding_to_nothing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.