for dear life

1. 1.

   as though your life was at stake

   “he was running for dear life”

Questions about for dear life

What does for dear life mean?

for dear life means "as though your life was at stake".

Is for dear life a common word?

for dear life is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.