Meaning
A job that offers no realistic prospect of promotion, advancement or career progress; employment in which effort leads nowhere. Farlex defines it as work in which no meaningful career progression or advancement into a higher position is possible. The image is a road closed at one end: you can keep moving, but you cannot move up. Normally hyphenated as a modifier (dead-end job, dead-end street) but often written open in casual use. Related compounds: dead-end street, dead-end kid (OED 1939), dead-ender, and the verb to dead-end (OED 1889). Origin stories built on the 1935 play or the Dead End Kids are debunked by the 1919 date. Regional use: United States origin; now general English.
Origin
Built on dead end, a street or passage closed at one end, extended to anything offering no way forward. The OED dates the noun and adjective dead end to 1848, while Merriam-Webster dates the noun to 1886 - a clean disagreement between the two dictionaries. The careers sense is older than the Hollywood legend: Merriam-Webster's adjective sense 'lacking opportunities especially for advancement' is illustrated with the very phrase 'a dead-end job' and dated 1919, sixteen years before Sidney Kingsley's Broadway play Dead End opened at the Belasco Theatre on 2 October 1935 and ran 687 performances (the 1937 film followed). The play and its Dead End Kids popularized the no-future metaphor - the OED dates dead-end kid to 1939 - but they did not invent it; the OED also records the verb to dead-end from 1889.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- dead-end jobs
- dead-end street
- dead-ender
Usage Examples
- Filing invoices in the back office was a dead-end job, and everyone who took it knew they would quit within a year.
- He stayed in the dead-end job for a decade because the commute was short and his fear of change was shorter.
- The plant's closing forced her to admit what she had dodged for years: it had been a dead-end job since the day she started.