Word.ws English Dictionary

social lubricant

social lubricant noun: a food, beverage, drug or activity that helps people feel more comfortable in social occasions.

Noun

social lubricant (plural social lubricants)

  1. (idiomatic) A food, beverage, drug or activity that helps people feel more comfortable in social occasions.
    • Beer's qualities as a “social lubricant” should play an important role in the debate on the harms of alcohol, according to the boss of Heineken.2025 October 25, Madeleine Speed, “Heineken stirs debate on health with toast to beer’s role as a social lubricant”, in FT Weekend, London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 1

Forms of social lubricant

pluralsocial lubricants

Origin of social lubricant

By a metaphor in which facilitating human social interaction is portrayed as lubricating machinery (e.g., oiling the gears, greasing the wheels); in this regard, compare also lubrication payment.

Questions about social lubricant

What does social lubricant mean?
Social lubricant means a food, beverage, drug or activity that helps people feel more comfortable in social occasions.
What part of speech is social lubricant?
Social lubricant is a noun.
What is the plural of social lubricant?
The plural of social lubricant is social lubricants.

Words near social lubricant in the dictionary

  1. social liberalism
  2. social life
  3. social listening
  4. social lives
  5. social loafing
  6. social lubricant
  7. social lubricants
  8. social marginality
  9. social media
  10. social media intelligence
  11. social media revolution

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: social lubricant (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:

Cite this entry: “social lubricant.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/social_lubricant. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.