Word.ws English Dictionary

waiting to happen

waiting to happen phrase: bound to happen; almost certain to occur in the future.

Phrase

waiting to happen

  1. (colloquial) Bound to happen; almost certain to occur in the future.
    • an accident waiting to happen, a divorce waiting to happen
    • On the most prosaic level, there’s the section in the show when what appears to be a giant rope made of knotted sheets ascends to the roof and transforms itself into a swing. Bono selects a fan from the front row in an echo of U2’s fabled Live Aid performance, seats them in the swing and pushes...2023 September 30, Alexis Petridis, “U2 review – an utterly astonishing, admirably raw Vegas extravaganza”, in The Guardian, London

Origin of waiting to happen

Modeled after accident waiting to happen and disaster waiting to happen; more generic uses outside of those phrases apparently started decades later, c. 1960s.

Questions about waiting to happen

What does waiting to happen mean?
Waiting to happen means bound to happen; almost certain to occur in the future.
What part of speech is waiting to happen?
Waiting to happen is a phrase.

Words near waiting to happen in the dictionary

  1. waiting staff
  2. waiting staffs
  3. waiting till the clouds roll by
  4. waiting time
  5. waiting times
  6. waiting to happen
  7. waiting up
  8. waiting upon
  9. waiting upon hand and foot
  10. waiting-room
  11. waiting-rooms

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: waiting to happen (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: “waiting to happen.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/waiting_to_happen. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.