Word.ws English Dictionary

nearly man

nearly man noun: a man who fails to achieve the success or status that he might potentially have had.

Noun

nearly man (plural nearly men)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) A man who fails to achieve the success or status that he might potentially have had.
    • It was Harris's lot to be a nearly man: a man nearly educated, nearly employed, nearly criminal, but never really toppling the edges to be labelled. He had been nearly married, and lived at this time with a woman who had also seen better days […]2000, David Brian Plummer, Lepus: The Story of a Hare, page 42
    • Snuggle's is housed in what was once a mid-sixties estate pub, the perfect place to wind down a life as a nearly man. Suburban mediocrity writ large.2011, Clive Gilson, Lorna Howarth, Songs of Bliss

Forms of nearly man

pluralnearly men

Questions about nearly man

What does nearly man mean?
Nearly man means a man who fails to achieve the success or status that he might potentially have had.
What part of speech is nearly man?
Nearly man is a noun.
What is the plural of nearly man?
The plural of nearly man is nearly men.

Words near nearly man in the dictionary

  1. nearly fall off one's chair
  2. nearly fallen off one's chair
  3. nearly falling off one's chair
  4. nearly falls off one's chair
  5. nearly fell off one's chair
  6. nearly man
  7. nearly men
  8. nearly never bulled a cow
  9. nearly never won the race
  10. nearly-dead
  11. nearly-deads

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nearly man (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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