Word.ws English Dictionary

smoking gun

smoking gun noun: evidence, particularly of a crime, that is difficult or impossible to dispute.

Noun

smoking gun (plural smoking guns)

  1. (idiomatic) Evidence, particularly of a crime, that is difficult or impossible to dispute.
    • We have a theory, but we haven't found a smoking gun yet.
    • When Prophet's place in Decatur, Georgia was raided in July 1989, there was the E911 Document, a smoking gun. And there was Prophet in the hands of the Secret Service, doing his best to "explain."1992, Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown […] , Bantam Books, →ISBN

Examples of smoking gun in a sentence

  • Evidently if we had found any ‘smoking gun’ we would have reported it to the Council.2003 January 9, Hans Blix, “Notes for Briefing the Security Council”, in UNMOVIC:
  • It's all over the blogosphere and Air America, the left-wing talk radio network: This is the smoking gun of the Iraq war.2005 June 12, Michael Kinsley, “No Smoking Gun”, in Washington Post:
  • We need a third smoking gun if we're really gonna smoke this son of a bitch."2023 September 28, HarryBlank, “Hooking Up”, in SCP Foundation, archived from the original on 25 May 2024:

Forms of smoking gun

pluralsmoking guns

Origin of smoking gun

Often traced back to the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Gloria Scott.

Questions about smoking gun

What does smoking gun mean?
Smoking gun means evidence, particularly of a crime, that is difficult or impossible to dispute.
How do you use smoking gun in a sentence?
Evidently if we had found any ‘smoking gun’ we would have reported it to the Council.
What part of speech is smoking gun?
Smoking gun is a noun.
What is the plural of smoking gun?
The plural of smoking gun is smoking guns.

Words near smoking gun in the dictionary

  1. smoking ceremony
  2. smoking compartment
  3. smoking compartments
  4. smoking concert
  5. smoking dope
  6. smoking gun
  7. smoking guns
  8. smoking hot
  9. smoking jacket
  10. smoking jackets
  11. smoking like a chimney

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: smoking gun (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-smoking gun.ogg.

Cite this entry: “smoking gun.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/smoking_gun. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.