Word.ws English Dictionary

thin blue line

thin blue line noun: the police.

Noun

the thin blue line

  1. (collective, colloquial) The police.
    • Crime wave overwhelms thin blue line [title]2005 March 27, Tony Thompson, Martin Bright, “Crime wave overwhelms thin blue line”, in The Observer, →ISSN
    • It followed dire warnings from the police staff associations that the possible loss of up to 40,000 police jobs would mean “Christmas coming early” for criminals, and the “thin blue line” left too stretched to cope with the inevitable risk of social and industrial unrest.2010 October 13, Alan Travis, “The thinner blue line – police warning over 25% budget cut”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
  2. A flag or symbol representing the police, commonly associated with the blue lives matter movement.
    • “Obviously, you’ve seen caravans with the Trump flag in the back of pickup trucks and then the thin blue line,” Mr. DeMasi, a former police officer, said. “I think maybe people had a good intention, but it ended up giving the meaning of the thin blue line a black eye.”2020 November 21, Michael Gold, “What Happened When a School District Banned Thin Blue Line Flags”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Origin of thin blue line

By analogy with Thin Red Line. “Blue” refers to the color of the uniforms of many police departments.

Questions about thin blue line

What does thin blue line mean?
Thin blue line means the police.
What part of speech is thin blue line?
Thin blue line is a noun.

Words near thin blue line in the dictionary

  1. thin as a barber's cat
  2. thin as a rail
  3. thin as a rake
  4. thin as a wafer
  5. thin as a yard of pump water
  6. thin blue line
  7. thin client
  8. thin clients
  9. thin computing
  10. thin content
  11. thin down

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: thin blue line (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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