Word.ws English Dictionary

down the drain

down the drain prepositional phrase: wasted or irretrievable.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic) Wasted or irretrievable.
    • Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
      Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain.1997, Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet, (Please provide the book title or journal name)
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see down, the, drain.

Synonyms of down the drain

Words formed from down the drain

Questions about down the drain

What does down the drain mean?
Down the drain means wasted or irretrievable.
What part of speech is down the drain?
Down the drain is a prepositional phrase.

Words near down the drain in the dictionary

  1. Down syndromed
  2. down tack
  3. down tacks
  4. down the banks
  5. down the cludgie
  6. down the drain
  7. down the gurgler
  8. down the hatch
  9. down the house
  10. down the khazi
  11. down the line

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: down the drain (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-down the drain.ogg.

Cite this entry: “down the drain.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/down_the_drain. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.