Word.ws English Dictionary

garbage time

garbage time noun: the period at the end of a timed sporting event that has become a blowout when the outcome of the game has already been decided, and the coaches of one or both teams will often decide to replace their best players with substitutes.

Noun

garbage time (uncountable)

  1. The period at the end of a timed sporting event that has become a blowout when the outcome of the game has already been decided, and the coaches of one or both teams will often decide to replace their best players with substitutes.
    • I play for two minutes of garbage time at the end of a blowout? Is that all the time I'm going to see anymore?1991, Kathleen Warnock, To the Top, page 16
    • It was garbage time, really, but it was a chance to get Corey some playing time, and Pedersen was out of pitchers anyway.2012, Don Winslow, The Gentlemen's Hour: A Novel, page 92
    Synonyms:
    junk time

Synonyms of garbage time

Questions about garbage time

What does garbage time mean?
Garbage time means the period at the end of a timed sporting event that has become a blowout when the outcome of the game has already been decided, and the coaches of one or both teams will often decide to replace their best players with substitutes.
What part of speech is garbage time?
Garbage time is a noun.

Words near garbage time in the dictionary

  1. garbage plate
  2. garbage plates
  3. garbage scow
  4. garbage scows
  5. Garbage State
  6. garbage time
  7. garbage truck
  8. garbage trucks
  9. garbage woman
  10. garbage women
  11. garbage-collected

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: garbage time (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:

Cite this entry: “garbage time.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/garbage_time. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.