how the sausage gets made
how the sausage gets made phrase: the unpleasant way in which a process or activity is carried on behind the scenes.
Phrase
how the sausage gets made
- The unpleasant way in which a process or activity is carried on behind the scenes.
- It is worlds away from conducting exciting operations, but it allows the officer to see "how the sausage gets made" and a stint in the post usually leads to a more desirable position.2007, Valerie Plame Wilson, Fair Game, page 163
- Nevertheless, reform-minded media professionals cannot seem to part with the idea that there is a substantial readership beyond those who subscribe to trade publications willing to spend money to read about how the sausage gets made in the news media business or to read critiques of press...2008, Arthur S. Hayes, Press Critics are the Fifth Estate: Media Watchdogs in America, page 93
Forms of how the sausage gets made
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Origin of how the sausage gets made
Possibly arising from 19th century witticisms unfavorably comparing lawmaking and sausage making, though common usage only appears in the late 1980s and is devoid of references to law.
Questions about how the sausage gets made
- What does how the sausage gets made mean?
- How the sausage gets made means the unpleasant way in which a process or activity is carried on behind the scenes.
- What part of speech is how the sausage gets made?
- How the sausage gets made is a phrase.
Words near how the sausage gets made in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: how the sausage gets made (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: “how the sausage gets made.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/how_the_sausage_gets_made. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.