dry hole
n.— «The Sunday night raid was what soldiers here call a “dry hole.” They received an intelligence tip, and it led to nothing.» —“Soldiers in Sunni Town Run Into Wall of Silence” by Josh White in Samarra, Iraq Washington Post Dec. 23, 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...