in the lurch

1. 1.

   in a difficult or vulnerable position

   “he resigned and left me in the lurch”

   idiom

Questions about in the lurch

What does in the lurch mean?

in the lurch means "in a difficult or vulnerable position".

Is in the lurch a common word?

in the lurch 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.