Cul-de-sac
noun ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A blind alley or dead end street.
"Before we had gone fifty yards we perceived that all hopes of getting further up the stream in the whale-boat were at an end, for not two hundred yards above where we had stopped were a succession of shallows and mudbanks, with not six inches of water over them. It was a watery cul de sac."
- 2 A circular area at the end of a dead end street to allow cars to turn around, designed so children can play on the street, with little or no through-traffic.
"And in suburbs known for new development, preservationists are often battling a general perception that there is nothing historic or worth saving among the cul-de-sacs."
- 3 An impasse. figuratively
"Physics seems, in fact, to have got itself into a cul-de-sac, obsessing over theories so mathematically abstruse that nobody even knows how to test them."
- 4 A sacklike cavity, a tube open at one end only.
Example
More examples"Sami and Layla lived in a cul-de-sac."
Etymology
Borrowed from French cul-de-sac, from cul (“bottom”) + de (“of”) + sac (“bag, sack”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.