English · Idiom Candidate

all dressed up and nowhere to go

Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.

Both English Tiếng Việt

Meaning · English

Feeling prepared or eager but lacking an opportunity to act

Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt

Chuẩn bị sẵn sàng nhưng thiếu cơ hội

Machine-translated — suggest a fix

Literally: wearing formal clothes without a destination

Where it’s used: Used Widespread English

Examples

[It's]a case of ‘ all dressed up and nowhere to go. ’’

British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)

Sources & notes

Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-30; pending editor spot-check.

Common questions

What does “all dressed up and nowhere to go” mean?

Feeling prepared or eager but lacking an opportunity to act Literally: wearing formal clothes without a destination

Is “all dressed up and nowhere to go” formal or informal?

No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.

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