not have a prayer
To have no chance or possibility, usually in the face of peril or adversity.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
“Without enough practice, he does not have a prayer of winning.”
“I do not have a prayer of finishing this book by tomorrow morning.”
“She does not have a prayer of fixing that broken phone herself.”
“The team was so exhausted by the final quarter that they did not have a prayer of catching up to their opponents.”
“If you forget to bring your passport to the airport, you do not have a prayer of boarding that international flight today.”
“The small local shop does not have a prayer of staying open now that a massive supermarket has started building next door.”
“Given the severity of the storm and the lack of proper equipment, the small vessel did not have a prayer of reaching the harbor safely.”
The phrase implies that the individual’s circumstances are so remarkably bleak that even divine intervention would prove insufficient to rectify them. It suggests a situation where the standard recourse to a deity has been rendered redundant by the sheer scale of the impending failure.
Last updated August 10, 2026