Word.ws English Dictionary

organ grinders

organ grinders is the plural of organ grinder.

Meaning of organ grinder

Noun

organ grinder (plural organ grinders)

  1. The player of a barrel organ.
    • There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it is the children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes his round.1903 October, Jack London, chapter XXIII, in The People of the Abyss, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    barrel organist
  2. (figuratively) The person who is in charge, rather than a lackey or representative; the person truly responsible for another's actions.
    • I want to speak to the organ grinder, not the monkey.

Questions about organ grinders

What is organ grinders the plural of?
Organ grinders is the plural of organ grinder.

Words near organ grinders in the dictionary

  1. organ donation
  2. organ donations
  3. organ donor
  4. organ donors
  5. organ grinder
  6. organ grinders
  7. organ gun
  8. organ guns
  9. organ harmonium
  10. organ harmoniums
  11. organ harvesting

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: organ grinders (page history and authors); organ grinder (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: “organ grinders.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/organ_grinders. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.