Nowhere means no place at all, or a place that doesn't exist. When you've looked everywhere for your missing homework and it's nowhere to be found, you mean it isn't in any location you can think of. When a story begins “in the middle of nowhere,” it means a remote, isolated place far from towns or cities.

The word captures the idea of absence or emptiness. A runner who seems nowhere close to the finish line is still very far away. A student who gets nowhere with a difficult problem hasn't made any progress at all.

Nowhere can also describe places so unimportant or unmemorable they barely seem to exist. A tiny, forgotten town might be dismissively called “nowhere,” though that's not very kind to the people who live there.

The phrase out of nowhere means something appears suddenly and unexpectedly, like when a correct answer pops into your head out of nowhere after you've stopped trying to remember it. Similarly, from nowhere describes rapid, surprising progress: an unknown athlete who surges from nowhere to win a race has surprised everyone by coming from behind to victory.