Word.ws English Dictionary

empty suit

empty suit noun: an ineffective or incompetent person in a place of authority.

Noun

empty suit (plural empty suits)

  1. (also, derogatory, idiomatic, slang) An ineffective or incompetent person in a place of authority.
  2. A politician who has not fulfilled any campaign promises.
    • John Doe is an empty suit running on an anti-populist platform.

Forms of empty suit

pluralempty suits

Origin of empty suit

Derived from unfavorable observations that ineffective professionals are memorable only for their attire and not their accomplishments at the workplace. First use appears c. 1950 in the New York Times.

Words formed from empty suit

Questions about empty suit

What does empty suit mean?
Empty suit means an ineffective or incompetent person in a place of authority.
What part of speech is empty suit?
Empty suit is a noun.
What is the plural of empty suit?
The plural of empty suit is empty suits.

Words near empty suit in the dictionary

  1. empty spaces
  2. empty stock working
  3. empty stock workings
  4. empty string
  5. empty strings
  6. empty suit
  7. empty suits
  8. empty sum
  9. empty sums
  10. empty the bench
  11. empty the clip

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: empty suit (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.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Sapaa-empty suit.wav.

Cite this entry: “empty suit.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/empty_suit. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.