Word.ws English Dictionary

guilt trip

guilt trip noun: a feeling of shame or embarrassment, especially if self-indulgent, unwarranted, exaggerated or felt over a significant period of time. Also the alternative form of guilt-trip.

Noun

guilt trip (plural guilt trips)

  1. (idiomatic) A feeling of shame or embarrassment, especially if self-indulgent, unwarranted, exaggerated or felt over a significant period of time.
    • to go on a guilt trip
    • to send someone on a guilt trip
  2. (idiomatic) An act that produces such a feeling.
    • I must admit that I personally dislike this form of fundraising and consider it to be one of the worst ways to raise awareness for any charity, the only one worse than this is the ‘knock on the door’ at teatime with the same ‘guilt trip’ message hammered home by the young person in the charity...2013 June 27, “Letters: getting over the charitable giving guilt trip”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
    • Sections of the media are culpable of only describing two types of African – powerful and corrupt, or destitute and starving. But Comic Relief’s biennial guilt trip perpetuates these stereotypes and fails to move the debate on in a constructive way.2017 March 24, David Lammy, “Africa deserves better from Comic Relief”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Also used as

guilt trip is also the alternative form of guilt-trip.

Examples of guilt trip in a sentence

  • First of all, I want to make it clear that nobody’s sending me on any guilt trip over my money.”1972, Judith Rossner, Any Minute I Can Split, New York: McGraw-Hill, →ISBN, page 174:
  • Kramon wants to go on a guilt trip, he can do so, but he is dead wrong that our generation shirked its responsibilities, and, frankly, I am getting tired of listening to this nonsense.2018 November 3, Robert Millsap, “Are Baby Boomers Being Selfish?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
  • And as for that guilt trip about seeing him at least once more, yes, I saw him a bunch more times.2020 September 1, Alexander Starritt, “‘We Germans,’ Alexander Starritt by the Author: An Excerpt”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:

Forms of guilt trip

Noun
pluralguilt trips
Verb
third-person singular presentguilt trips
present participleguilt tripping
past participleguilt tripped
pastguilt tripped

Origin of guilt trip

From guilt + trip. First use appears c. 1972 in the novel Any Minute I Can Split by Judith Rossner.

Words formed from guilt trip

Questions about guilt trip

What does guilt trip mean?
Guilt trip means a feeling of shame or embarrassment, especially if self-indulgent, unwarranted, exaggerated or felt over a significant period of time.
How do you use guilt trip in a sentence?
First of all, I want to make it clear that nobody’s sending me on any guilt trip over my money.”
What part of speech is guilt trip?
Guilt trip is a noun.
What is the plural of guilt trip?
The plural of guilt trip is guilt trips.

Words near guilt trip in the dictionary

  1. guilt complexes
  2. guilt lane
  3. guilt lanes
  4. guilt offering
  5. guilt offerings
  6. guilt trip
  7. guilt tripped
  8. guilt tripping
  9. guilt trips
  10. guilt-free
  11. guilt-ridden

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: guilt trip (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-guilt trip.wav.

Cite this entry: “guilt trip.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/guilt_trip. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.