Wiktionary
a. In the least favorable of all possible circumstances.
Usage examples of "worst-case".
One of these two possibilities was that the missing people were dead, or else hiding from whoever wanted them that way, a worst-case scenario that, neither wishing to interrupt the appetite of their son, who scarfed pizza under the same suspension of physical law that allows Dagwood Bumstead to eat sandwiches, would have to go unsaid.
On the other hand, if the packs of Hidden Island ended up chasing down some worst-case branches of the search trees, things might stretch out to a few years.
Yet even in a worst-case scenario, with the most modern compensators the Peeps had, there was no longer any way both bogeys could avoid action, given their overtake velocity and the current range.
Some of the worst-case outcomes were going to require counteractions that he would have to undertake by himself, through private and discreet ventures—including the ultimate fallback of evacuating his entire family from Commonwealth space altogether.
What it boiled down to was that nobody could guarantee a failproof way of making sure it could never get out into the atmosphere with a lot of worst-case ‘what-if?
She'd often met with Bennett in New York or the Denver headquarters until the wee hours of the morning, mapping out strategies, crunching numbers, debating best- and worst-case scenarios.
But Avi, with his genius for imagining the most horrific conceivable worst-case scenarios, demanded that they have their own machine, and that Randy and the others go through its kernel code one line at a time to verify that there were no security holes.
Even taking a worst-case scenario, they said—assuming not one but two entire gas diffusion centrifuge cascades operating not for one but for two years—there was no way in creation Iraq could have more than half the uranium-235 she would need for a single medium-yield device.