Word.ws English Dictionary

dirty work

dirty work noun: one or more unpleasant tasks, assignments, or employment duties, especially those of a disreputable or illicit nature.

Noun

dirty work (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic) One or more unpleasant tasks, assignments, or employment duties, especially those of a disreputable or illicit nature.
    • [A] sort of little back kitchen, where dirty work, such as washing up dishes, might be done.1848, [Elizabeth Gaskell], chapter II, in Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life. […] (Chapman and Hall’s Series of Original Works of Fiction, Biography, and General Literature), volume (please...
    • "I am no telltale," said James scornfully. […] Jasper urged James to give information about Rodney, but he steadily refused. "I leave others to do such dirty work," he said.1893, Horatio Alger, chapter 21, in Cast Upon the Breakers

Examples of dirty work in a sentence

  • [M]any a business-man can say he doesn't do dirty work, because he has others do it for him.1917, Upton Sinclair, chapter 11, in King Coal:
  • In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.1936, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], “Shooting an Elephant”, in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, London: Secker and...
  • US experts believe the Iraqi intelligence service will set the plots in motion, then recruit or extort amateurs to do the dirty work.2003 February 4, Elaine Shannon [et al.], “At Home, the FBI Keeps Tabs on Iraqis”, in Time, New York, N.Y.: Time Inc., →ISSN, →OCLC...

Questions about dirty work

What does dirty work mean?
Dirty work means one or more unpleasant tasks, assignments, or employment duties, especially those of a disreputable or illicit nature.
How do you use dirty work in a sentence?
[M]any a business-man can say he doesn't do dirty work, because he has others do it for him.
What part of speech is dirty work?
Dirty work is a noun.

Words near dirty work in the dictionary

  1. dirty weather
  2. dirty weekend
  3. dirty weekends
  4. dirty word
  5. dirty words
  6. dirty work
  7. dirty wound
  8. dirty wounds
  9. dirty-handed
  10. dirty-handedness
  11. dirty-minded

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dirty work (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: en-au-dirty work.ogg.

Cite this entry: “dirty work.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dirty_work. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.