a situation that is unlikely to be successful or to make any progress: We had several customer leads that all turned out to be dead ends. It's very demoralizing for her; she perceives that her career is at a dead end.

How do you use dead end in a sentence?

1. Remember that adversity is not a dead end but a detour to a better outcome. 2. His research was at a dead end.

Is a dead end an idiom?

The expression dead end first appeared in the 1880s to describe a closed water pipe. By the 1920s the term came to be used as an idiom to mean a situation from which there is no escape. ... When used as an adjective before a verb, the term is hyphenated as in dead-end.