stalemate

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Difficult situations and unpleasant experiences
a hard/tough row to hoeidiom
abyss
adversity
at your worstidiom
Augean
bad hair day
epidemic
half nelson
hardness
have a bumpy rideidiom
pall
prison
purgatory
push factor
quagmire
quicksand
scrape
strait
the Augean Stablesidiom
the hard wayidiom

standoff | American Dictionary

standoff
noun[ C ]
us/ˈstændˌɔf/
a situation in which neither side has won a competition or argument, or an occasion when someone prevents officials from acting, usually by threatening violence:
The battle of wills between teacher and student was a standoff.
She locked herself in the house, but after a brief standoff, police convinced her to come out.

standoff | Business English

standoff
noun[ C ]
(alsostand-off)uk /ˈstændɒf/us
a situation in which agreement in an argument does not seem possible:
standoff between sb and sbThe standoff between potential buyers and sellers has effects throughout the economy.
The major issue hanging over both the stock and bond markets is the budget standoff in Washington

Examples of standoff

standoff
The standoff focused two very different readings of the nature of things.
The best recent works move beyond the melting pot/salad bowl standoff.
The number of males involved in a fight or standoff was also determined.
Nothing of the discussion was declared publicly, yet it seems clear that the cafezistas were in disagreement over the best way to end the standoff.
This occurs when the tungsten plasma diverges, and the laser standoff is eliminated.
The most the theist need concede is a standoff with respect to intuitions concerning the divine nature and the range of possible worlds.
In the third group of data, the liner thickness was varied while the apex angle, the standoff, and the liner thickness were kept constant.
Usually, more than two males were involved in the standoff resulting in a pile-up.
I see the standoff and conclude that neither view is reasonable.
In other words, in these cases, no second-order substantive principle is available to resolve the first-order standoff.
Furthermore, within a complex internal context, the standoff between the two major protagonists from 1990 remains critical.
Standoff annotations refer to specific locations in the primary data, by addressing byte offsets, elements, etc., to which the annotation applies.
Catalyst is a distributed architecture for the communication of standoff annotations among independent text processing components.
The circumstances of that standoff changed during the 1789/90 dry season, however, with significant consequences for leaders in all camps, whether rebels or customary elites.
In the second group of data, the standoff distance was varied while the apex angle, the liner thickness, and the weight of the charge were maintained.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.