End of the line

“End of the line” is an idiom used to signify the conclusion or final stage of a process or journey. It often implies that you can’t make any further progress and that your effort has reached its limit. This can be used in the context of academic research, where a hypothesis is conclusively rejected, indicating that the current line of inquiry cannot proceed further. In business, “the end of the line” can mean that a product or business has failed and there are no more options for continuing. In relationships, it could mean the relationship has ended after a lot of effort.

Examples:

• After months of unsuccessful trials, the research team realized they had reached the end of the line with their current experiment.
• When the funding was cut, it marked the end of the line for the community project.
• After years of counseling, the couple realized they had reached the end of the line. They simply could not resolve our differences, so they decided to split up.