fly in the ointment

1. 1.

   an inconvenience that detracts from the usefulness of something

   Broadertroublesomeness

Questions about fly in the ointment

What does fly in the ointment mean?

fly in the ointment means "an inconvenience that detracts from the usefulness of something".

Is fly in the ointment a common word?

fly in the ointment 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.