Word.ws English Dictionary

smoke screen

smoke screen is the alternative form of smokescreen.

Meaning of smokescreen

Noun

smokescreen (plural smokescreens)

  1. Smoke used as a disguise, mask or cover, as of troops in battle.
    • Ensign Whitely began to tell of the surprise encounter of Admiral Sprague’s escort-carrier force with the main battle line of the Japanese Navy off Samar, in a chaos of rain squalls and smoke screens.1951, Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Chapter 25, Part 5, p. 284
  2. (figuratively) Anything used metaphorically to conceal or distract.
    • All that talk is just a smokescreen to disguise the fact that he has nothing to say.

Forms of smoke screen

pluralsmoke screens

Questions about smoke screen

What is smoke screen the alternative form of?
Smoke screen is the alternative form of smokescreen.

Words near smoke screen in the dictionary

  1. smoke rooms
  2. smoke sail
  3. smoke sails
  4. smoke sauna
  5. smoke saunas
  6. smoke screen
  7. smoke screens
  8. smoke shop
  9. smoke shops
  10. smoke show
  11. smoke shows

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: smoke screen (page history and authors); smokescreen (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: “smoke screen.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/smoke_screen. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.