Dictionaries › English

closet

Pronunciation: /ˈklɒzɪt/

The English word “closet” has 20 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A small room within a house used to store clothing, food, or other household supplies.
  2. Any private space, (particularly) bowers in the open air.
  3. Any private or inner room, (particularly)
  4. A private room used by women to groom and dress themselves.
  5. A private room used for prayer or other devotions.
  6. A place of (usually, fanciful) contemplation and theorizing.
  7. The private residence or private council chamber of a monarch.
  8. A pew or side-chapel reserved for a monarch or other feudal lord.
  9. One used to store valuables.
  10. One used to store curiosities.
  11. A secret or hiding place, (particularly) the hiding place in English idioms such as in the closet and skeleton in the closet.
  12. One intended for storing clothes or bedclothes.
  13. An ordinary similar to a bar but half as broad.
  14. A sewer.
  15. A state or condition of secrecy, privacy, or obscurity.
  16. The state of having one's sexual orientation a secret.
  17. A compendium of knowledge, possibly from closet as a room?

adjective

  1. Private.
  2. Closeted, secret (especially with reference to gay people who are in the closet).
  3. Denoting anything kept a secret or private.

Etymology

From Middle English closet, from Old French closet, from clos (“private space”) + -et (diminutive suffix), from Latin clausum. Equivalent to close + -et, but generally applied in French solely to small open-air enclosures.

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “closet” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.