English · Idiom Candidate

dead men's shoes

Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.

Both English Tiếng Việt

Meaning · English

a position or role that someone else has left or been removed from

Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt

Vị trí hoặc vai trò mà người khác đã rời bỏ hoặc bị loại bỏ

Machine-translated — suggest a fix

Literally: shoes that belonged to dead men

Where it’s used: Used Widespread English

Examples

In time it became customary to grant more than one reversion to an office, so that a queue of expectant administrators could be seen waiting to step successively into a dead man's shoes.

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.

Topics: Clothes Life & death

Common questions

What does “dead men's shoes” mean?

a position or role that someone else has left or been removed from Literally: shoes that belonged to dead men

Is “dead men's shoes” formal or informal?

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