Meaning
Someone whose doom is already decided - the condemned prisoner on his last walk, or anyone facing a sacking, a rout, or a fate so certain that colleagues speak of them in the past tense. The shout carries a curse's certainty. Gallows-humour register, usually about careers and scorelines rather than lives; the literal sense still shadows it, so use with care. Regional use: General English; American prison origin.
Origin
The phrase began as the traditional announcement in United States prisons, heralding a condemned prisoner on his way to the execution site - the shout familiar from Stephen King's The Green Mile (1996), where Percy escorts Coffey with the supposed traditional cry, dead man walking. The widening was rapid: someone soon to die, then anyone facing unavoidable loss, often before they know it themselves; even meteorology borrowed it for the human-silhouette shape of multivortex tornadoes. Popular culture did the rest - Sister Helen Prejean's 1993 book about ministering to death-row prisoners, the 1995 film and Jake Heggie's 2000 opera after it, and Bruce Springsteen's Dead Man Walkin' on the soundtrack - so that the phrase now walks every corridor where someone's future has quietly closed.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a dead man walking
- dead man walking here
- dead woman walking
Usage Examples
- After the memo leaked, the director was a dead man walking; only the leaving date was negotiable.
- Two goals down and a man down, the visitors were dead men walking for the whole of the second half.
- The intern cheerfully distributed her audit of the partners - a dead woman walking, and delighted about it.