Word.ws English Dictionary

pretty pass

pretty pass noun: an unsatisfactory situation.

Noun

pretty pass (plural pretty passes)

  1. (dated) An unsatisfactory situation.
    • "Things have got to a pretty pass, if a woman can't give a warm supper and a bed to poor, starving creatures, just because they are slaves, and have been abused and oppressed all their lives, poor things!"1851 June – 1852 April, Harriet Beecher Stowe, chapter 9, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), Boston, Mass.: John P[unchard] Jewett & Company...
    • The prisoner of unknown bandits, hurried he knew not whence, a pretty pass for an adventurer.1900, John Buchan, chapter 29, in The Half-Hearted

Examples of pretty pass in a sentence

  • Sam Levy’s house one night, but Sam just stood on his porch and told ‘em things had come to a pretty pass, he’d sold ’em the very sheets on their backs.1960 July 11, Harper Lee, chapter 15, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company...
  • Things have come to a pretty pass when a highly regarded City law firm does not know whether it is employing its own staff legally.2005 February 15, Edward Fennell, “New migrant rules prompt City firms to worry about their own staff”, in The Times, UK, retrieved 16 Jan...

Forms of pretty pass

pluralpretty passes

Questions about pretty pass

What does pretty pass mean?
Pretty pass means an unsatisfactory situation.
How do you use pretty pass in a sentence?
Sam Levy’s house one night, but Sam just stood on his porch and told ‘em things had come to a pretty pass, he’d sold ’em the very sheets on their backs.
What part of speech is pretty pass?
Pretty pass is a noun.
What is the plural of pretty pass?
The plural of pretty pass is pretty passes.

Words near pretty pass in the dictionary

  1. pretty boys
  2. Pretty Good Privacy
  3. pretty horsebreaker
  4. pretty horsebreakers
  5. pretty much
  6. pretty pass
  7. pretty passes
  8. pretty pennies
  9. pretty penny
  10. pretty pictures
  11. Pretty Pine

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pretty pass (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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