0 someone or something that is very unlikely to be successful, especially because of a mistake or bad judgment:
Practice goes on quite happily in theatres up and down the country without troubling itself over theory, which, on the other hand, is a dead duck without practice.
In my view, that makes the treaty a dead duck.
Does not this make his target for 1970 an absolute dead duck?
If two-thirds of the commoners do not consent, then it is a "dead duck", and cannot get any further.
If it is not a lame duck, it is probably a dead duck.
That measure is the deadest dead duck that there ever was.
He knows that centralised socialism is a dead duck, but what does he want to put in its place?
Apart from that, however, this idea of going on with this plane seems to me to be a dead duck before it is even hatched.
