cul-de-sac

noun cul-de-sacs · culs-de-sac · culdesac · cul de sac

1. A blind alley or dead end street. Before we had gone fifty yards we perceived that all hopes of getting further up the stream in the whale-boat were at an end, for not two hundred yards above where we had stopped were a succession of shallows and mudbanks, with not six inches of water over them. It was a watery cul de sac.
2. A circular area at the end of a dead end street to allow cars to turn around, designed so children can play on the street, with little or no through-traffic. And in suburbs known for new development, preservationists are often battling a general perception that there is nothing historic or worth saving among the cul-de-sacs.
3. figuratively An impasse. Physics seems, in fact, to have got itself into a cul-de-sac, obsessing over theories so mathematically abstruse that nobody even knows how to test them.
4. A sacklike cavity, a tube open at one end only.