Word.ws English Dictionary

sad sack

sad sack noun: an incompetent or inept person.

Noun

sad sack (plural sad sacks)

  1. (US) An incompetent or inept person.
    • One law enforcement official played down Mr. Defreitas’s ability to carry out an attack, calling him “a sad sack” and “not a Grade A terrorist.”2007 June 3, Cara Buckley, William K. Rashbaum, “4 Men Accused of Plot to Blow Up Kennedy Airport Terminals and Fuel Lines”, in New York Times, retrieved 05 Apr 2015
  2. (US) A perennial failure or victim of misfortune.
    • “Super Sad” takes as its Romeo and Juliet, its Tristan and Iseult, a middle-aged sad sack named Lenny Abramov and a much younger beauty named Eunice Park.2010 July 26, Michiko Kakutani, “Love Found Amid Ruins of Empire”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
    • Weary of his drab life with its nowhere job, failed marriage, boring girlfriend, and estranged teenage son, a middle-aged sad sack fakes his death, changes his identity, and hits the road.2013 April 27, “Movie capsules: Arthur Newman”, in Boston Globe, retrieved 05 Apr 2015
    Synonyms:
    defeatist, loser

Synonyms of sad sack

Forms of sad sack

pluralsad sacks
alternative formsadsack

Origin of sad sack

US 1920s. Popularized by Sad Sack, a cartoon character and eponymous comic strip published originally June 1942 in Yank, the Army Weekly, a US Army publication for soldiers, and later syndicated in the US 1940s and 1950s. Presumably from vulgar “sad sack of shit” as cartoonist Sgt. George Baker said he took it from a “longer phrase, of a derogatory nature”. The term originally referred to a well-meaning but inept soldier.

Questions about sad sack

What does sad sack mean?
Sad sack means an incompetent or inept person.
What part of speech is sad sack?
Sad sack is a noun.
What is the plural of sad sack?
The plural of sad sack is sad sacks.

Words near sad sack in the dictionary

  1. sad drunks
  2. sad number
  3. sad numbers
  4. sad panda
  5. sad pandas
  6. sad sack
  7. sad sacks
  8. sad to say
  9. sad tree
  10. sad trees
  11. sad trombone

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sad sack (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-sad sack.ogg.

Cite this entry: “sad sack.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sad_sack. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.