dirty laundry

1. 1.

   personal matters that could be embarrassing if made public

   Synonymsdirty linen

   Broaderpersonal business

Questions about dirty laundry

What does dirty laundry mean?

dirty laundry means "personal matters that could be embarrassing if made public".

What is another word for dirty laundry?

Close synonyms include dirty linen. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is dirty laundry a common word?

dirty laundry is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.