Word.ws English Dictionary

code brown

code brown noun: the situation of a person defecating in an undesirable location (e.g. hospital bed or retail store), requiring cleanup.

Noun

code brown (plural code browns)

  1. (humorous) The situation of a person defecating in an undesirable location (e.g. hospital bed or retail store), requiring cleanup.
    • I hear the store speaker call for a cleanup crew: "Code brown on Aisle 2 with a possible runaway cart track to 16."2005 September 9, Bruce Michaud, “Dog-day misery in Aisle 16”, in North of Tampa, St. Petersburg Times, page 2

Forms of code brown

pluralcode browns

Origin of code brown

Probably originally a code used in some hospitals; some hospitals today still use code brown to one or another kind of environmental or hazardous-material emergency.

Questions about code brown

What does code brown mean?
Code brown means the situation of a person defecating in an undesirable location (e.g. hospital bed or retail store), requiring cleanup.
What part of speech is code brown?
Code brown is a noun.
What is the plural of code brown?
The plural of code brown is code browns.

Words near code brown in the dictionary

  1. code bases
  2. code block
  3. code blocks
  4. code blue
  5. code blues
  6. code brown
  7. code browns
  8. code cart
  9. code cave
  10. code caves
  11. code completion

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: code brown (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)-Flame, not lame-code brown.wav.

Cite this entry: “code brown.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/code_brown. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.