Word.ws English Dictionary

guilty pleasure

guilty pleasure noun: something that brings pleasure but is considered taboo, unadvisable or lowbrow.

Noun

guilty pleasure (plural guilty pleasures)

  1. (idiomatic) Something that brings pleasure but is considered taboo, unadvisable or lowbrow.
    • For the renowned sushi chef, it was a guilty pleasure to eat fish sticks drowned in tartar sauce.
    • Rock bands record classic albums, while pop stars create "guilty pleasure" singles. It's supposed to be self-evident: U2's entire oeuvre deserves respectful consideration, while a spookily seductive song by an R&B singer named Tweet can only be, in the smug words of a recent VH1 special, "awesomely...2004 October 31, Kelefa Sanneh, “The Rap Against Rockism”, in The New York Times

Examples of guilty pleasure in a sentence

  • Rock bands record classic albums, while pop stars create "guilty pleasure" singles.2004 October 31, Kelefa Sanneh, “The Rap Against Rockism”, in The New York Times:
  • During the summer of 1993, my guilty pleasure was watching Saved by the Bell reruns.2012, Seth Vannatta, Chuck Klosterman and Philosophy: The Real and the Cereal, Open Court, →ISBN, page ix:
  • In postmodernism, mass culture is not so much a guilty pleasure as it is the white noise of our time.2013, Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents, Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 242:

Forms of guilty pleasure

pluralguilty pleasures

Questions about guilty pleasure

What does guilty pleasure mean?
Guilty pleasure means something that brings pleasure but is considered taboo, unadvisable or lowbrow.
How do you use guilty pleasure in a sentence?
Rock bands record classic albums, while pop stars create "guilty pleasure" singles.
What part of speech is guilty pleasure?
Guilty pleasure is a noun.
What is the plural of guilty pleasure?
The plural of guilty pleasure is guilty pleasures.

Words near guilty pleasure in the dictionary

  1. guilty
  2. guilty as a cat in a goldfish bowl
  3. guilty as charged
  4. guilty as sin
  5. guilty conscience
  6. guilty pleasure
  7. guilty pleasures
  8. guilty-like
  9. guiltylike
  10. guiltyness
  11. Guim

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: guilty pleasure (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: en-au-guilty pleasure.ogg.

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