Word.ws English Dictionary

no soap

no soap phrase: it is (or was) a failure.

Phrase

no soap

  1. (dated, idiomatic, slang) It is (or was) a failure.
    • I went back down to the men's room on the second floor and yelled his name in front of the private apartments, but no soap.1942, Rex Stout, Black Orchids, Farrar & Rinehart
    • I waited for his assistance but it didn't come. He let me trail for I don't know how long. I hollered and cried, cursed, rocked the boat. No soap.1953 September 18, Saul Bellow, chapter XXV, in The Adventures of Augie March […], New York, N.Y.: The Viking Press, →OCLC

Examples of no soap in a sentence

  • Still and all, after weighing the pluses and minuses of Smooth's offer, he came, to the only possible conclusion for a civilized man—no soap.1983 March, Bruce Jay Friedman, “Detroit Abe”, in Esquire:
  • And he tried again—Lou always persisted—but no soap.1992, Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes: The Way to the White House, Random House:

Synonyms of no soap

Origin of no soap

The phrase appears, with no clear meaning, in a 1755 Samuel Foote nonsense prose poem, "The Grand Panjandrum". In the U.S., soap took on the meaning of money (see OED), and so no soap was a denial of money, say in response to a request for some.

Questions about no soap

What does no soap mean?
No soap means it is (or was) a failure.
How do you use no soap in a sentence?
Still and all, after weighing the pluses and minuses of Smooth's offer, he came, to the only possible conclusion for a civilized man—no soap.
What part of speech is no soap?
No soap is a phrase.

Words near no soap in the dictionary

  1. no sleep for the wicked
  2. no small feat
  3. no small thing
  4. no smoke without fire
  5. no smoking
  6. no soap
  7. no sooner said than done
  8. no sooner than
  9. no soup for you
  10. no speaks
  11. no string attached

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: no soap (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: “no soap.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/no_soap. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.