MEANING
To lose an opportunity because you fail to act in time.
Use it for
acting too late to benefit; losing a chance through delay; failing to seize an opportunity; being too slow to join somethingAttributes a lost opportunity to acting too late rather than to lack of ability. Writing functions: Lost opportunity. Semantic categories (by meaning): Lost opportunity; Timing. Contexts: General conversation; Creative prose.
Words that belong together
- miss the boat on something
- have already missed the boat
On the page
By waiting for another discount, I missed the boat and the course sold out.
The publisher missed the boat when it ignored the growing demand for audiobooks.
Word forms
- Base
- miss the boat
Usage notes
Inflect miss: misses the boat; missed the boat; missing the boat. Use miss out on for an explicit object if needed. Register: informal. Commonness: common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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