Word.ws English Dictionary

closed shops

closed shops is the plural of closed shop.

Meaning of closed shop

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.

Questions about closed shops

What is closed shops the plural of?
Closed shops is the plural of closed shop.

Words near closed shops in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: closed shops (page history and authors); 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.

Last updated:

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