forlorn hope

1. 1.

   a hopeless or desperate enterprise

   Broaderenterprise

Questions about forlorn hope

What does forlorn hope mean?

forlorn hope means "a hopeless or desperate enterprise".

Is forlorn hope a common word?

forlorn hope 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.