kitchensink.com.au

Guides · Tile 06

Everything but the kitchen sink

“Everything but the kitchen sink” means almost everything you can think of, usually more than anyone needs; the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries label it informal and humorous. Its age is less settled: one idiom dictionary says it may date from the early 1900s, while Wiktionary, citing the Online Etymology Dictionary, calls it military slang from 1944.

Three dictionaries, one idea

The definitions agree on the size of the pile and differ, charmingly, on whether the pile is a problem.

Cambridge is neutral: a website with everything but the kitchen sink sounds rather good. Oxford adds “probably more than is necessary”, which is exactly the camping trip in its example. The American Heritage entry is the sternest, with “whether appropriate or not”. Wiktionary splits the difference with “almost everything, whether needed or not”.

When did it start?

Here the sources give different starting points, and neither claims a first user.

Early 1900s?

The American Heritage Idioms Dictionary, on Dictionary.com, calls the phrase hyperbolic and says it may go back to the early 1900s, though it did not spread widely until the mid-1900s.

1944?

“Originally military slang, 1944.” Wiktionary, which gives the Online Etymology Dictionary’s entry for “kitchen sink” as its source.

Neither source names a first user or a first printed appearance, so this guide leaves the date where the dictionaries leave it: the sources give different starting points, from the early 1900s to 1944.

The “under the sun” variant is far older in its own right. The same entry dates “under the sun”, meaning everything on earth, to about AD 1000.

The sink on its own

Drop “everything but” and the kitchen sink still does a lot of work. Wiktionary records a figurative noun, “a miscellaneous item or a miscellany, especially exemplifying an indiscriminate profusion”, with the example “They threw the kitchen sink at the problem, but still couldn’t fix it.” It suggests this sense probably comes from the longer phrase. Statisticians have a “kitchen sink regression”, listed by Wiktionary as a related term, and one of the example sentences on the Cambridge page describes an analyst who throws “everything but the kitchen sink” into a regression, hoping some statistical pattern will turn up.

Kitchen-sink, the adjective

With a hyphen, the sink becomes a kind of art. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines kitchen-sink, used before a noun, as describing plays, films, novels and the like that deal with ordinary people and everyday life, especially its dull or hard side.

Wiktionary traces the painting sense to the British art critic David Sylvester, who it says coined it in a December 1954 article titled “The Kitchen Sink”, describing a realist style that painted the drab, untidy home interiors of urban working-class life. From a picture of washing up to a label for a whole movement is a long way for a fixture to travel.

An older, ruder sink

Wiktionary also keeps an obsolete sense: “a thing regarded as defiled due to corruption, immorality, etc.”, illustrated by an 1889 Rudyard Kipling story in which a character complains of “this kitchen-sink of a Government”. The sink has been a figure of speech for well over a century; only the cheerful senses appear in the learner’s dictionaries quoted above.

And the word kitchen

The Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries trace kitchen to Old English cycene, a word of West Germanic origin with relatives in Dutch keuken and German Küche, built on the Latin coquere, “to cook”. So the room is named for the cooking, and the phrase is named for the one thing in the room nobody could pack.

This site, by its name, has the opposite habit: everything here is about the sink. Start with the splashback drawing on the home page.

Sources for this page