Word.ws English Dictionary

closed shop

closed shop noun: a business or industrial establishment whose employees are required to be labor union members as a precondition to employment.

Noun

closed shop (plural closed shops)

  1. A business or industrial establishment whose employees are required to be labor union members as a precondition to employment.
    • [...] about 90 per cent of the locomotive staff belong to one trade union and 10 per cent to another smaller one or to none, for there is no such thing in Switzerland as a "closed shop".1963 January, ""Mercury"", “Driver training and single-manning in Switzerland”, in Modern Railways, page 42
  2. (historical) A facility that runs programs on behalf of others, giving them no oversight over execution but merely returning the output at the end.

Forms of closed shop

pluralclosed shops

Questions about closed shop

What does closed shop mean?
Closed shop means a business or industrial establishment whose employees are required to be labor union members as a precondition to employment.
What part of speech is closed shop?
Closed shop is a noun.
What is the plural of closed shop?
The plural of closed shop is closed shops.

Words near closed shop in the dictionary

  1. closed round s
  2. closed season
  3. closed seasons
  4. closed set
  5. closed sets
  6. closed shop
  7. closed shops
  8. closed source
  9. closed species
  10. closed syllable
  11. closed syllables

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: closed shop (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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