closeted
/ˈklɒzɪtɪd/
More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations
cot caught merger/ˈklɑzɪtɪd/
closeted adjective: not open about one's sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity. Also the simple past and past participle of closet.
Adjective (1)
closeted (comparative more closeted, superlative most closeted)
- Not open about one's sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity.
- Sally Gearhart, an ex-christian from Illinois who in the early seventies abandoned closeted lesbianism on Midwestern church college faculties for radical feminism in San Francisco,1979 December 15, Jil Clark, Sally Gearhart, “Spirituality vs. Politics”, in Gay Community News, volume 7, number 21, page 8
- Belize: Get out your oven mitts. Guess who just checked in with the troubles? The Killer Queen Herself. New York's number one closeted queer.1992, Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995, Part Two: Perestroika, Act One, Scene 4, p. 156
- Synonyms:
- in the closet
- Not open about some aspect of one's identity, tendency, or fondness; secret.
- […] the remaining quotations, chiefly from English poetry, interested me only slightly more. They were the elegiac favourites of a closeted Romantic.1971, Cynthia Ozick, “The Pagan Rabbi”, in Collected Stories, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, published 2006, page 12
- Now he feels a connection between his own closeted, esoteric sufferings and strivings and those of the poor urban working people all around him.1982, Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Penguin, published 1988, page 45
Adjective (2)
closeted (not comparable)
- Confined.
- He's spent all day closeted in his room.
- After they had been closeted up with the fortune-teller for some time, I knew by their looks, upon their returning, that they had been promised something great.1766, Oliver Goldsmith, chapter X, in The Vicar of Wakefield, London: J.C. Nimmo, published 1886, page 68
- sheltered; protected.
- In my salubrious constituency of Cheltenham and in the leafy lanes of Gloucestershire, we are perhaps somewhat closeted from these unpleasant and harsh realities of the urban world of London, Plymouth, Birmingham and other major cities1985 January 25, Charles Irving, Hansard
Also used as
closeted is also the simple past and past participle of closet.
Examples of closeted in a sentence
- Sokolsky asks if he realizes that this is a walk-in clinic for closeted reality benders, and he's a disaster-response coordinator, not a therapist.2022 September 12, “Exploring the SCP Foundation: SCP-7000 - The Loser” (10:38 from the start), in The Exploring Series, retrieved 25 Mar...
- Letterblair were closeted together after dinner.1920, Edith Wharton, chapter XI, in The Age of Innocence, New York: D. Appleton & Co., page 94:
- Now when the Foretopman found himself closeted there, as it were, in the cabin with the Captain and Claggart, he was surprised enough.1924, Herman Melville, chapter 17, in Billy Budd, London: Constable & Co.:
Synonyms of closeted
Forms of closeted
| comparative | more closeted |
|---|---|
| superlative | most closeted |
Origin of closeted
From closet (“state of concealment”) + -ed.
See closet (verb)
Words formed from closeted
Questions about closeted
- What does closeted mean?
- Closeted means not open about one's sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity.
- How do you use closeted in a sentence?
- Sokolsky asks if he realizes that this is a walk-in clinic for closeted reality benders, and he's a disaster-response coordinator, not a therapist.
- What part of speech is closeted?
- Closeted is an adjective.
- How do you pronounce closeted?
- Closeted is pronounced /ˈklɒzɪtɪd/.
Words near closeted in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: closeted (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-NaomiAmethyst-closeted.wav.
Cite this entry: “closeted.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/closeted. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.