Word.ws English Dictionary

mug's game

mug's game noun: a foolish, profitless, or hopeless undertaking.

Noun

mug's game (plural mugs' games)

  1. (idiomatic) A foolish, profitless, or hopeless undertaking.
    • ‘It's a mug's game,’ said Crabbe.1956, Anthony Burgess, Time for a Tiger (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 109
    • The sheer destructiveness of nuclear weapons makes the quest for defenses a mug's game.1988 May 20, Strobe Talbot, “Inside Moves”, in Time

Forms of mug's game

pluralmugs' games

Questions about mug's game

What does mug's game mean?
Mug's game means a foolish, profitless, or hopeless undertaking.
What part of speech is mug's game?
Mug's game is a noun.
What is the plural of mug's game?
The plural of mug's game is mugs' games.

Words near mug's game in the dictionary

  1. mug off
  2. mug shot
  3. mug shots
  4. mug shotted
  5. mug up
  6. mug's game
  7. mug-hunting
  8. mug-shotted
  9. muga
  10. Mugabe
  11. Mugabeism

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mug's game (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-mug's game.ogg.

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