Word.ws English Dictionary

paper ceiling

paper ceiling noun: an informal (and often unacknowledged) barrier to promotion or advancement, in employment and elsewhere, for people who do not have a university or college degree.

Noun

paper ceiling

  1. An informal (and often unacknowledged) barrier to promotion or advancement, in employment and elsewhere, for people who do not have a university or college degree.

Origin of paper ceiling

paper (a piece of paper being the diploma representing a university or college degree) + ceiling (suggesting a barrier to upward advancement); modeled on glass ceiling, the first of such figurative ceiling terms.

Questions about paper ceiling

What does paper ceiling mean?
Paper ceiling means an informal (and often unacknowledged) barrier to promotion or advancement, in employment and elsewhere, for people who do not have a university or college degree.
What part of speech is paper ceiling?
Paper ceiling is a noun.

Words near paper ceiling in the dictionary

  1. paper candidates
  2. paper cartridge
  3. paper cartridges
  4. paper case
  5. paper cases
  6. paper ceiling
  7. paper chain
  8. paper chains
  9. paper chase
  10. paper chases
  11. paper chromatogram

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: paper ceiling (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: “paper ceiling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/paper_ceiling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.