flat tire
Americannoun
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a pneumatic tire that has lost all or most of its air through leakage, puncture, or the like.
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Older Slang. a dull or socially inept person.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of flat tire
First recorded in 1920–25
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
What if he gets an inopportune flat tire or worse?
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 10, 2026
The old Nigerian-prince emails promised a fortune; the modern romance scam asks for something smaller and sadder: the money to fix a flat tire, the cost of a plane ticket forever about to be booked.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 14, 2026
It's not like you can drive your car down the road, get a flat tire, pull over, fix it and keep going.
From Barron's ● Apr. 10, 2026
I can’t touch the clot in a patient’s coronary, or see their stroke in the same way I can see a flat tire.
From Salon ● May 20, 2025
But the best day of the whole trip, at least as far as my mother and I were concerned, was the day that we had a flat tire in the Ozark Mountains.
From "Homesick" by Jean Fritz
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
