out-of-office
out-of-office noun: an email auto-reply informing people that the person they are trying to contact is not working and unavailable for an extended period of time.
Noun
out-of-office (plural out-of-offices)
- An email auto-reply informing people that the person they are trying to contact is not working and unavailable for an extended period of time.
- There are poetic out-of-offices and humorous (or supposedly humorous) out-of-offices. There are out-of-offices that boast or complain about the person’s likely whereabouts (Bali! Jury duty.).2015 August 27, Emily Gould, “The Art of the Out-of-Office Reply”, in The New York Times
- That doesn’t happen in even the most enlightened workplaces, but nothing makes me feel more patriotic than emailing a French company in summer, getting an out-of-office that sends me to someone else, that person also being en vacances and suggesting a third, whose out-of-office directs me back to...2023 August 7, Emma Beddington, “Email makes my fingers tingle and my stomach drop with dread. Can’t we go back to pigeons?”, in The Guardian
Forms of out-of-office
| plural | out-of-offices |
|---|
Origin of out-of-office
From out of office.
Questions about out-of-office
- What does out-of-office mean?
- Out-of-office means an email auto-reply informing people that the person they are trying to contact is not working and unavailable for an extended period of time.
- What part of speech is out-of-office?
- Out-of-office is a noun.
- What is the plural of out-of-office?
- The plural of out-of-office is out-of-offices.
Words near out-of-office in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: out-of-office (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: “out-of-office.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/out-of-office. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.