Word.ws English Dictionary

nearly men

nearly men is the plural of nearly man.

Meaning of nearly man

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

Questions about nearly men

What is nearly men the plural of?
Nearly men is the plural of nearly man.

Words near nearly men in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nearly men (page history and authors); 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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Cite this entry: “nearly men.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nearly_men. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.