no man's land
noun [mass noun]
1Disputed ground between the front lines or trenches of two opposing armies: enemy soldiers facing you across no man’s land...
- He was awarded the Military Cross after fearlessly walking into no-man's-land between the opposing troops to comfort wounded and dying soldiers.
- Before the end of the war, however, the ineffectiveness of cavalry units in modern warfare had been realised and he was given a new, even more dangerous role - as a scout in no-man's-land.
- At 5am on Christmas Day, British and German troops walk across no-man's-land, talking and exchanging souvenirs.
1.1An indeterminate or undefined place or state: the no man’s land between the two parties is where presidential contests are won and lost an unmapped no man’s land between the traditional command economy and the market...
- Pet cloning exists in a regulatory no man's land.
- Remix collections rarely satisfy fully, usually falling into a no man's land which fans of the original artists have little interest in exploring.
- His request was rejected, and he found himself in a bizarre no man's land: exiled from home and barred from entering France.
1.2 [count noun] A piece of unowned land or wasteland: between Riverside Drive and Central Park West was a no man’s land, a zone of welfare tenements...
- Beyond the checkpost at Thal, a tiny, fly-blown, windblown nowhere of a village on the edge of Pakistan's tribal areas, is a no-man's-land where the only law is that of the gun and the tribe.
- In the late 1990s, for instance, developer Larry Silverstein built an apartment tower on 42nd Street, near the Lincoln Tunnel - previously a residential no-man's-land.
- Potsdamer Platz, once a no-man's-land across which concrete barriers and barbed wire stretched, now has a McDonald's and Starbucks.
Origin
Middle English: originally the name of a plot of ground lying outside the north wall of the city of London, the site of a place of execution.