BLIND ALLEY • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Blind alley

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/blaɪnd ˈæli/ Listen

Blind alley

noun

A street with only one way in or out. Synonyms: cul de sac, dead-end street, impasse.

(figurative) a course of action that is unproductive and offers no hope of improvement. "So far every road that we've been down has turned out to be a blind alley"

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Etymology of 'Blind alley'

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"Blind alley" Quotes from Famous Books

... of one hundred trails, ten at the most would lead to any result: but you must follow each one of the hundred up until you reach proof that you are in a blind alley. ...

— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason

... to a blind alley and perplexity was in her face, though she tried to put the question nonchalantly. What then? How deep ran the current of ...

— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... wrong which I had before regarded as permissible. Yet my struggle for insight was still confined to the circle of the understanding, and led me, while reading such writings as those of Strauss, Feuerbach, and Bruno Bauer, only deeper into the blind alley of doubt. ...

— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... cobwebby, smothered in dust and obscurity; so out of the way, indeed, that it was difficult to find, and our guide was obliged to inquire where the institution was! The traveler may conscientiously omit a visit to the blind alley which contains the Museum of Antiquities at Cordova. The guide, by the way, we found much more intent upon selling us Spanish lace than anxious to impart desirable local information. To be a good guide, as Izaak Walton says of anglers and poets, a ...

— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... but I must tell you that the following Thursday I met William Jones up a kind of a blind alley where I was working, while he was working in a house on the opposite side. He had me in a corner where there was no chance to run, so I put on a bold face and went right up to him ...

— Frictional Electricity - From "The Saturday Evening Post." • Max Adeler

... way! The hall ends just around the corner and there's no way out. It's a blind alley, and if the fellow went down here ...

— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes

... at Muswell Hill. "Her father shall pay me for it doubly: with his purse and with his life." With that thought in his heart, Richard Turlington wound his way through the streets by the river-side, and stopped at a blind alley called Green Anchor Lane, infamous to this day as the chosen resort of the most abandoned wretches whom ...

— Miss or Mrs.? • Wilkie Collins

... one way out. I'm tired of living like an Alpine ibex, all day long above the snow-line. I'm tired of this blind alley of inaction. I'm tired of decisions deferred and threats evaded. I want to get away to think things over, to step back and regain a perspective on the ...

— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

Words linked to "Blind alley" : trope, course, course of action, dead-end street, cul de sac, figure, image, impasse, figure of speech, thoroughfare