The Collaborative International Dictionary
No-man's land \No"-man's` land`\, No-man's-land \No"-man's`-land`\
(Naut.) A space amidships used to keep blocks, ropes, etc.; a space on a ship belonging to no one in particular to care for.
An unoccupied area between opposing armies.
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Hence: (Fig.): An unclaimed space or time.
That no-man's land of twilight.
--W. Black.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
also no man's land, "terrain between front lines of entrenched armies," 1908, popularized in World War I; in use from at least early 14c. as Nonemanneslond, an unowned waste ground outside the north wall of London, site for executions. No man (Old English nanne mon) was an old way of saying "nobody."
Wiktionary
n. (alternative spelling of no man's land English)
Usage examples of "no-man's-land".
LONDON had entered a new phase now, a temporal no-man's-land between departing clubbers and arriving cleaners.
The Chattery Teeth came to rest on the wind-up key, a slanted, disembodied grin out here in the middle of no-man's-land.
He had moved far enough in the direction of the Carvers' house to be caught in a kind of no-man's-land when the two vans opened fire, and knew he was extremely lucky to still be alive.
We were in lower Willowsville, a no-man's-land it seemed to us, grassy vacant lots, a hulking railroad overpass, a used car dealer's and smudged-looking stucco buildings, row with cramped front yards--a neighborhood so different from the rest of our village it might have been in Cheektowaga, Tonawanda, or the gritty urban edge of Buffalo itself.
Here the plain square houses of the council estates gave way to a forlorn and eerie no-man's-land, where streets of once-fine, three-storey terraced houses still stood, inexplicably preserved from the bulldozer, surrounded by areas levelled in expectation of a boomtime that had never come.
We cannot dogmatise upon this subject of the penal spheres, and yet we have very clear teaching that they are there and that the no-man's-land which separates us from the normal heaven, that third heaven to which St.
He felt very naked, very much exposed as he awkwardly got up into no-man's-land and scrambled back through the barbed wire toward the forwardmost U.
If you don't have a crossover expression which is perfectly neutral anywhere in Hilbert space, then you're automatically making an assumption about a real No-Man's-Land.
For years, Yu Chi had made his base in the no-man's-land of wild mountains that thrust up like a fist between China, Burma and Tibet, a region where boundaries and sovereignties were shadowy things.
Instead, whatever combination of warlords that was in command of the army had made their men stand back, leaving maybe a thousand yards of dusty no-man's-land between attackers and defenders, putting them beyond the effective range of the majority of the city's weapons.