Word.ws English Dictionary

poison-pen letter

poison-pen letter noun: a missive which is malicious, insulting, and/or defamatory toward a person, organization, or point of view, especially one which is unsigned.

Noun

poison-pen letter (plural poison-pen letters)

  1. (idiomatic) A missive which is malicious, insulting, and/or defamatory toward a person, organization, or point of view, especially one which is unsigned.
    • Miss Theresa Samuels . . . is accused by the Post Office authorities of sending scurrilous letters to young women whose engagements to marry had been publicly announced. . . . Those who received the poison pen letters were not willing to court the notoriety that would follow the prosecution of the...1915 December 18, “Poison Pen Writer Released on Bail”, in New York Times, retrieved 25 Aug 2010, page 7
    • A retired academic was the author of a poison-pen letter campaign that brought 12 years of fear to a North Yorkshire village, a court was told yesterday. Dr James Forster . . . was alleged to have branded one villager a prostitute and sent the 13-year-old daughter of the parish clerk a copy of a...2001 August 1, Nigel Bunyan, “Twelve-year reign of poison pen villager”, in telegraph.co.uk, retrieved 25 Aug 2010

Forms of poison-pen letter

pluralpoison-pen letters
alternative formpoison pen letter

Questions about poison-pen letter

What does poison-pen letter mean?
Poison-pen letter means a missive which is malicious, insulting, and/or defamatory toward a person, organization, or point of view, especially one which is unsigned.
What part of speech is poison-pen letter?
Poison-pen letter is a noun.
What is the plural of poison-pen letter?
The plural of poison-pen letter is poison-pen letters.

Words near poison-pen letter in the dictionary

  1. poison taster
  2. poison the well
  3. poison-ivy
  4. poison-nut
  5. poison-nuts
  6. poison-pen letter
  7. poison-pen letters
  8. poisonability
  9. poisonable
  10. poisonal
  11. poisonberry

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: poison-pen letter (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: En-au-poison-pen letter.ogg.

Cite this entry: “poison-pen letter.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/poison-pen_letter. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.