Word.ws English Dictionary

lost cause

lost cause noun: a person or thing that is hopeless or futile.

Noun

lost cause (plural lost causes)

  1. (idiomatic) A person or thing that is hopeless or futile.
    • He has already made up his mind, and it's a lost cause to try to change it.
    • Artfully pulling the ball back to leave McCleary chasing a lost cause, Sánchez calmly made space for a shot and applied a finish that beat the despairing dives of both Federici and Michael Hector, the latter vainly attempting to recover position when it was too late.2015 April 18, Paul Wilson, The Guardian
    Synonyms:
    sinking ship

Proper noun capitalized: Lost Cause

the Lost Cause

  1. The belief that the Confederate cause during the American Civil War was just and not related to slavery.
    • Also implicit was the idea that all southerners accepted the basic tenets of the Lost Cause myth and concurred in this celebration of the Confederacy.1993 April, H. E. Gulley, “Women and the Lost Cause: preserving a Confederate identity in the American Deep South”, in Journal of Historical Geography, volume 19, number 2, →DOI, →ISSN, pages 125–141

Synonyms of lost cause

Forms of lost cause

plurallost causes

Origin of lost cause

From the generic term lost cause. The Confederacy was, of course, defeated.

Questions about lost cause

What does lost cause mean?
Lost cause means a person or thing that is hopeless or futile.
What part of speech is lost cause?
Lost cause can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of lost cause?
The plural of lost cause is lost causes.

Words near lost cause in the dictionary

  1. lost
  2. lost and found
  3. lost and founds
  4. lost articles
  5. lost caste
  6. lost cause
  7. lost causes
  8. Lost City
  9. Lost Colony
  10. lost control
  11. lost count

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lost cause (page history and authors); Lost Cause (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: En-au-lost cause.ogg.

Cite this entry: “lost cause.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/lost_cause. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.