Word.ws English Dictionary

flop sweat

flop sweat noun: sweat due to nervousness, especially fear of failure.

Noun

flop sweat (usually uncountable, plural flop sweats)

  1. (slang, usually) Sweat due to nervousness, especially fear of failure.
    • Billy Vine, covered with flop sweat, started so-so, but in a few minutes he had them.15 March 1947, Bill Smith, "Night Club Reviews", Billboard page 36
  2. (slang, usually) Panic or anxiety about possible failure.
    • This is the point very often where panic sets in. In theatre jargon, we call it "flop sweat."1979, Ken Waissman, Maxine Fox, “Broadway: A sound heard around the world”, in Beyond Media, →ISBN, page 264

Forms of flop sweat

pluralflop sweats
alternative formflopsweat

Origin of flop sweat

From flop + sweat.

Questions about flop sweat

What does flop sweat mean?
Flop sweat means sweat due to nervousness, especially fear of failure.
What part of speech is flop sweat?
Flop sweat is a noun.
What is the plural of flop sweat?
The plural of flop sweat is flop sweats.

Words near flop sweat in the dictionary

  1. flop down
  2. flop era
  3. flop eras
  4. flop for
  5. flop style
  6. flop sweat
  7. flop sweats
  8. flop tube
  9. flop tubes
  10. flop-eared
  11. flop-house

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: flop sweat (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-flop sweat.ogg.

Cite this entry: “flop sweat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/flop_sweat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.