silver ceiling
silver ceiling noun: an informal (and often unacknowledged) barrier to promotion or advancement, in employment and elsewhere, for middle-aged and elderly people.
Noun
silver ceiling
- An informal (and often unacknowledged) barrier to promotion or advancement, in employment and elsewhere, for middle-aged and elderly people.
- Although society won't change its negative impressions about aging overnight, we are beginning to see real cracks in the "silver ceiling," the point at which age becomes a serious obstacle to employment.2007, Jeri Sedlar, Rick Miners, Don't Retire, Rewire!, Alpha Books, →ISBN, page 239
- He notes that the consumption of hair-colouring and hair-loss products, along with moisturisers, pedicures, facials and even cosmetic surgery by middle-aged men has increased over recent decades in order to avoid the 'silver ceiling'.2015, Matthew Hall, Metrosexual Masculinities, Palgrave Macmillan, →ISBN, page 44
Origin of silver ceiling
silver (suggesting the gray hair characteristic of advanced age) + ceiling (suggesting a barrier to upward advancement); modeled on glass ceiling, the first of such figurative ceiling terms.
Questions about silver ceiling
- What does silver ceiling mean?
- Silver ceiling means an informal (and often unacknowledged) barrier to promotion or advancement, in employment and elsewhere, for middle-aged and elderly people.
- What part of speech is silver ceiling?
- Silver ceiling is a noun.
Words near silver ceiling in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: silver 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: “silver ceiling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/silver_ceiling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.