Word.ws English Dictionary

mixed company

mixed company noun: men and women, both present at a gathering.

Noun

mixed company (uncountable)

  1. Men and women, both present at a gathering.
    • "Imagine my one attempt at rational conversation last night. Asking his views on female emigration . . . ."
      "Perhaps the bearings of the question would hardly suit mixed company."1880, Charlotte M. Yonge, chapter 5, in Clever Woman of the Family
    • "Took 'er home all right, did yuh?" he leered, as if they two were in possession of a huge joke of the kind which may not be told in mixed company.1908, B. M. Bower, chapter 3, in The Long Shadow

Examples of mixed company in a sentence

  • "Fifteen or 20 years ago, you couldn't even mention the word prostate in polite mixed company."2001 June 24, Leon Jaroff, “The Man's Cancer”, in Time:
  • Only a Cancer female can describe in mixed company a night spent with a lover and a double-sided dildo without a sniff of shame or irony.2004, Stella Starsky, Quinn Cox, Sextrology: The Astrology of Sex and the Sexes, page 189:

Questions about mixed company

What does mixed company mean?
Mixed company means men and women, both present at a gathering.
How do you use mixed company in a sentence?
"Fifteen or 20 years ago, you couldn't even mention the word prostate in polite mixed company."
What part of speech is mixed company?
Mixed company is a noun.

Words near mixed company in the dictionary

  1. mixed business with pleasure
  2. mixed case
  3. mixed chalice
  4. mixed chalices
  5. mixed climbing
  6. mixed company
  7. mixed conditional
  8. mixed conditionals
  9. mixed connective tissue disease
  10. mixed declension
  11. mixed declensions

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mixed company (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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