dog's chance

English

Pronunciation

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

Noun

a dog's chance

1. (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 September 16, Ian Jack, “Is this the end of Britishness”, in The Guardian:

     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.

Synonyms

• snowball's chance in hell