Word.ws English Dictionary

behind closed doors

behind closed doors prepositional phrase: in private; in one's private life; lacking (normal) public disclosure, in camera.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic) In private; in one's private life; lacking (normal) public disclosure, in camera.
    • What you do with your girlfriend behind closed doors is none of my business.
    • Miss Maudie shook her head. “If he’s not [crazy] he should be by now. The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets-”1960 July 11, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC
  2. (idiomatic) Without public spectators.
    • Libya's opening home match in the World Cup qualifiers against Cameroon will be played at a neutral venue and behind closed doors, FIFA said on Friday. https://web.archive.org/web/20150611004158/http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/04/20/soccer-world-libya-idINDEE83J07G20120420
  3. (idiomatic) stored in a hidden place.
    • In other research, scientists have found that people who kept cereal out in the open were often about 20 pounds heavier than people who kept cereal behind closed doors.2015 May 18, Angus Chen, How We Store Food At Home Could Be Linked To How Much We Eat

behind closed doors meaning in Arabic

behind closed doors in Arabic

in private
خلف الأبواب المغلقة ḵalfa l-ʔabwābi l-muḡlaqa

Examples of behind closed doors in a sentence

  • A brilliant piece of undercover reporting revealed extraordinary details of how senior City executives behave behind closed doors.2018 January 25, Amelia Gentleman, “Men-only clubs and menace: how the establishment maintains male power”, in the Guardian:
  • A major problem has been the making of bad decisions behind closed doors.2021 December 29, Nigel Harris, “Comment: Problems galore in 2021...”, in RAIL, number 947, page 3:

Synonyms of behind closed doors

Questions about behind closed doors

What does behind closed doors mean?
Behind closed doors means in private; in one's private life; lacking (normal) public disclosure, in camera.
What is behind closed doors in Arabic?
Behind closed doors in Arabic is خلف الأبواب المغلقة (ḵalfa l-ʔabwābi l-muḡlaqa). See Behind closed doors meaning in Arabic.
How do you use behind closed doors in a sentence?
A brilliant piece of undercover reporting revealed extraordinary details of how senior City executives behave behind closed doors.
What part of speech is behind closed doors?
Behind closed doors is a prepositional phrase.

Words near behind closed doors in the dictionary

  1. behighting
  2. behights
  3. behind
  4. behind bars
  5. behind center
  6. behind closed doors
  7. behind every great man is a great woman
  8. behind every great man there stands a woman
  9. behind every successful man there stands a woman
  10. behind in the count
  11. behind its time

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: behind closed doors (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-behind closed doors.ogg.

Cite this entry: “behind closed doors.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/behind_closed_doors. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.