Word.ws English Dictionary

hot potatoes

hot potatoes is the plural of hot potato.

Meaning of hot potato

Noun

hot potato (countable and uncountable, plural hot potatoes)

  1. (uncountable) A child's game in which players pass a ball or other item between them, with the object of avoiding being left holding the item when time expires.
    Synonyms:
    pass the parcel
  2. (countable, idiomatic) An unwanted problem that is awkward or delicate.
    • The “lame duck” Johnson Administration, in its final fortnight in office, grappled last week with a diplomatic hot potato in the form of the latest Soviet proposal for a “just and lasting” Middle East peace settlement.1969 January 12, Benjamin Welles, “A Hot Potato for Nixon”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Questions about hot potatoes

What is hot potatoes the plural of?
Hot potatoes is the plural of hot potato.

Words near hot potatoes in the dictionary

  1. hot pool
  2. hot pools
  3. hot poop
  4. hot pot
  5. hot potato
  6. hot potatoes
  7. hot pots
  8. hot press
  9. hot presses
  10. hot properties
  11. hot property

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hot potatoes (page history and authors); hot potato (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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Cite this entry: “hot potatoes.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hot_potatoes. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.