The compound noun dead-ender appeared occasionally in the second half of the 20th century.

At the end, it looks like a dead-ender because there are recycling bins and other debris from the last ten centuries.

I became a mercenary, a dead-ender without principles-willing to fight for anyone who would pay my bar bills.

But when the status quo is going to fall, there's little to be gained and much to be lost for being a dead-ender.

There didn't seem to be much reason for the alley--it was a dead-ender, and neither of the adjacent buildings had a door opening onto it.

Die-hard can have a connotation of nobly fighting in a lost cause, but dead-ender connotes foolhardy unwillingness to accept defeat.

First, Romney needed to win by a big enough margin that no one, not even the staunchest Newt dead-ender, could keep alive fantasies of a Gingrich presidency.

The novelist Bharati Mukherjee wrote in a 1995 New York Times book review of "the American as a mournful yuppie or a beer-drinking dead-ender."

Then The Independent of London noted that "Neanderthal Man was not in fact a man but a chinless dead-ender who became extinct because he failed to intermarry with our human ancestors."

Hamdan is a narrative dead-ender, a whiny schlub who, like too many of his brethren, appears to have joined Al Qaeda because his VCR broke or he ran out of gum.

DEAD-ENDER "He's a rather determined dead-ender type," said Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, speaking of the Taliban leader Mullah Omar in November 2001.

In 1978, The Globe and Mail of Canada headlined an article "Good Bounce for Dead-Ender Tom McPhee"; McPhee came out of a deeply underprivileged ("Dead End Kid") background to win a basketball scholarship.