FORLORN HOPE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does forlorn hope mean? 

• FORLORN HOPE (noun)
  The noun FORLORN HOPE has 1 sense:

1. a hopeless or desperate enterprise

  Familiarity information: FORLORN HOPE used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• FORLORN HOPE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A hopeless or desperate enterprise

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Hypernyms ("forlorn hope" is a kind of...):

endeavor; endeavour; enterprise (a purposeful or industrious undertaking (especially one that requires effort or boldness))

 Context examples 

All that evening I had felt like the soldier who awaits the signal which will send him on a forlorn hope; hope of victory and fear of repulse alternating in his mind.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Miss Ingram rose solemnly: "I go first," she said, in a tone which might have befitted the leader of a forlorn hope, mounting a breach in the van of his men.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

He was moving softly to the door, when, in a forlorn hope of saying something naturally—which I never could, to this man—I said: Oh! Littimer! Sir! Did you remain long at Yarmouth, that time?

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

This light was my forlorn hope: I must gain it.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Let us rest here, said St. John, as we reached the first stragglers of a battalion of rocks, guarding a sort of pass, beyond which the beck rushed down a waterfall; and where, still a little farther, the mountain shook off turf and flower, had only heath for raiment and crag for gem—where it exaggerated the wild to the savage, and exchanged the fresh for the frowning—where it guarded the forlorn hope of solitude, and a last refuge for silence.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

This was a forlorn hope—he was almost sure that Wilson had no friend: there was not enough of him for his wife.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)