laundry
Plurallaundries (some meanings)
- 1Clothes, linens, or other items that need to be washed, are being washed, or have just been washed.
She hung the laundry on the line to dry in the afternoon sun.
Piles of clean laundry covered the couch, waiting to be folded.
Note
The word names the clothes as well as the place that washes them, and the New York Court of Appeals records of 1935 catch both in one line: "I gave the laundry to the laundry." Dirty laundry is the usual pairing for what still needs washing, and as a mass noun it takes a singular verb: the laundry is dry.
- 2The washing of clothes and linens, often as a regular household chore.
Whose turn is it to do the laundry this week?
With three kids in soccer, laundry takes up most of her Sunday.
Similarwashing
Note
The chore has its own set phrase, do the laundry, with the: in a family of five, someone has to do the laundry every other day. The word came into English through Old French lavanderie from Latin lavandaria, and launder, the verb for the washing itself, belongs to the same family.
- 3A place or room where laundering is done, whether of clothes or, by extension, of other things.
The hotel's laundry is in the basement, next to the boiler room.
She dropped off two bags of shirts at the laundry on Main Street.
Similarlaundromat, launderette
Note
Any place where washing gets done can be a laundry, even a geyser. Henry J. Winser's The Yellowstone National Park, a manual for tourists of 1883, complains that Old Faithful was "sometimes degraded by being made a laundry": garments left in the crater while it was quiet came out "thoroughly washed" at the next eruption.
- 4A business that exists mainly to hide where illegally obtained money came from.
Prosecutors say the car wash was a laundry for the cartel's drug money.
Investigators traced the cash through a chain of laundries disguised as restaurants.
Similarfront
- 5A penalty flag in American football.
There's laundry on the field, and it looks like holding on the offense.
The officials threw so much laundry in the first half that the game dragged on for hours.
Similarflag
Note
This is football talk rather than rulebook language: officials throw laundry, and laundry on the field means a foul has been called. It behaves like the everyday mass noun, so a heavily penalized game simply has a lot of laundry, and the joke lies in picturing the penalty flag as a piece of washing tossed onto the grass.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English lavendrie, which came from Old French lavanderie and, before that, from Latin lavandaria; compare launder.