See dead man walking in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"etymology_text": "A phrase traditionally used in U.S. prisons to announce a condemned prisoner being walked to the place of execution. Its use has expanded as a euphemism for anyone facing an impending and unavoidable loss.",
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"(figurative) Someone who is about to face an unavoidable loss (though the person may not realize it)."
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"(meteorology, slang) A multivortex tornado typically appearing in the form of a human figure walking."
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Download raw JSONL data for dead man walking meaning in English (2.8kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-01-16 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-01-01 using wiktextract (d1270d2 and 9905b1f). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.