Word.ws English Dictionary

one-way ticket to Palookaville

one-way ticket to Palookaville noun: something that results in failure or obscurity, with no chance at redemption; a dead end.

Noun

one-way ticket to Palookaville (plural one-way tickets to Palookaville)

  1. (idiomatic) Something that results in failure or obscurity, with no chance at redemption; a dead end.
    • […1954, Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront, spoken by Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando)
    • Proper German gentlemen harbored a particular distaste for boxing and its two-fisted muscularity, considering it lower class and bestial, a one way ticket to Palookaville.2007, Douglas Booth, The Field: Truth and Fiction in Sport History, page 128

Forms of one-way ticket to Palookaville

pluralone-way tickets to Palookaville

Origin of one-way ticket to Palookaville

From a line in the 1954 film On the Waterfront.

Questions about one-way ticket to Palookaville

What does one-way ticket to Palookaville mean?
One-way ticket to Palookaville means something that results in failure or obscurity, with no chance at redemption; a dead end.
What part of speech is one-way ticket to Palookaville?
One-way ticket to Palookaville is a noun.
What is the plural of one-way ticket to Palookaville?
The plural of one-way ticket to Palookaville is one-way tickets to Palookaville.

Words near one-way ticket to Palookaville in the dictionary

  1. one-way mirror
  2. one-way mirrors
  3. one-way street
  4. one-way streets
  5. one-way ticket
  6. one-way ticket to Palookaville
  7. one-way tickets
  8. one-way tickets to Palookaville
  9. one-way time
  10. one-way times
  11. one-wayed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: one-way ticket to Palookaville (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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