Word.ws English Dictionary

plumbers and firemen

plumbers and firemen noun: a notional inferior level of competition that allowed past champions to excel.

Noun

plumbers and firemen

  1. (derogatory, informal) A notional inferior level of competition that allowed past champions to excel.

Origin of plumbers and firemen

Originated from a exchange in a 2022 episode of First Take. In response to a remark that Bob Cousy once had 29 assists in a game, JJ Redick responded, "well, he was being guarded by plumbers and firemen".

Questions about plumbers and firemen

What does plumbers and firemen mean?
Plumbers and firemen means a notional inferior level of competition that allowed past champions to excel.
What part of speech is plumbers and firemen?
Plumbers and firemen is a noun.

Words near plumbers and firemen in the dictionary

  1. plumberies
  2. plumbering
  3. plumbering up
  4. plumberless
  5. plumbers
  6. plumbers and firemen
  7. plumbers up
  8. plumbership
  9. plumbery
  10. plumbian
  11. plumbic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: plumbers and firemen (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-plumbers and firemen.wav.

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