dog's chance
English
Pronunciation
Audio (AU) (file)
Noun
a dog's chance
- (idiomatic) Little or no likelihood.
- 1936, F.J. Thwaites, chapter XVII, in The Redemption, Sydney: H. John Edwards, published 1940, page 177:
- "Poor old boy was in a pretty bad way. Fact is,I didn't give him a dog's chance."
- 2014, Ian Jack, "Is this the end of Britishness", The Guardian, 16 September 2014:
- One day, more than 60 years ago, we went as a family to the National Wallace Monument. My father took a binary, black-and-white approach to people and things: in toothpaste, Colgate was bad and Euthymol good; in bicycles, Raleigh was preferred to BSA; in Polar explorers, Captain Scott didn’t stand a dog’s chance against Amundsen.
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Synonyms
- snowball's chance in hell