Word.ws English Dictionary

poison pen letter

poison pen letter is the alternative form of poison-pen letter.

Meaning of poison-pen letter

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

Forms of poison pen letter

pluralpoison pen letters

Questions about poison pen letter

What is poison pen letter the alternative form of?
Poison pen letter is the alternative form of poison-pen letter.

Words near poison pen letter in the dictionary

  1. poison parsley
  2. poison parsnip
  3. poison pawn
  4. poison pawns
  5. poison pen
  6. poison pen letter
  7. poison pen letters
  8. poison pens
  9. poison pill
  10. poison pills
  11. poison queue

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: poison pen letter (page history and authors); 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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Cite this entry: “poison pen letter.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/poison_pen_letter. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.