Word.ws English Dictionary

once-in-a-lifetime

once-in-a-lifetime adjective: likely to happen only once in one's lifetime; extremely rare.

Adjective

once-in-a-lifetime (not comparable)

  1. Likely to happen only once in one's lifetime; extremely rare.
    • a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel the world
    • With Trump in office, they see what one Gulf official called a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to achieve his country’s objectives.2025 May 11, Nadeen Ebrahim and Abbas Al Lawati, “Trump is visiting three of the world’s richest nations. Here’s what’s on their wish list”, in CNN
    Synonyms:
    of a lifetime

Synonyms of once-in-a-lifetime

Questions about once-in-a-lifetime

What does once-in-a-lifetime mean?
Once-in-a-lifetime means likely to happen only once in one's lifetime; extremely rare.
What part of speech is once-in-a-lifetime?
Once-in-a-lifetime is an adjective.

Words near once-in-a-lifetime in the dictionary

  1. once upon a time
  2. once you go black
  3. once you go black, you never go back
  4. once you go Persian, there's no other version
  5. once-in-a-generation
  6. once-in-a-lifetime
  7. once-off
  8. once-offs
  9. once-over
  10. once-over-lightlies
  11. once-over-lightly

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: once-in-a-lifetime (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: “once-in-a-lifetime.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/once-in-a-lifetime. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.