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• locker room
  locker room

  noun

  a room containing lockers, as in a gymnasium, factory, or school, for changing clothes and for the storage and safekeeping of personal belongings.
• locker-room
  locker-room

  adjective

  of, characteristic of, or suitable to conversation in a locker room; earthy or sexually explicit.

locker room

¹ American  

noun

• locker rooms
  plural

1. a room containing lockers, as in a gymnasium, factory, or school, for changing clothes and for the storage and safekeeping of personal belongings.

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locker-room ² American  

[lok-er-room, -room] / ˈlɒk ərˌrum, -ˌrʊm /

adjective

1. of, characteristic of, or suitable to conversation in a locker room; earthy or sexually explicit.

   locker-room humor.

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• locker rooms
  plural

Etymology

Origin of locker room¹

First recorded in 1890–95

Origin of locker-room²

First recorded in 1945–50

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

locker room locker-room

“When I get to that moment in the locker room before a very big match,” Ms. Sharapova tells Ms. Kumar Nair, “I feel like it’s my second skin, like it’s part of my body.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 21, 2026

“Those who know me in this locker room, those who know me in the building, those are the people I care about.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 20, 2026

When Abe Saperstein, the Globetrotters’ founder, stormed the Reds locker room in a huff, Klotz warned him, “If you let your guard down, we’ll get you again.”

From Salon ● Aug. 19, 2026

"We will not smash the locker room now and celebrate a lot," he said after the 2-1 win.

From BBC ● Aug. 8, 2026

He blew his whistle again to corral everyone else into the locker room.

From "Here to Stay" by Sara Farizan

Later, there were cheers and applause: standing near Shane in an otherwise-empty row of locker-room showers was the confident Ilya Rozanov, from Russia.

From BBC ● Jan. 17, 2026

In that one locker-room speech dressed as a news-conference answer, he showed his players that this cool persona can be tough and unafraid, and then he took it a step further.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 12, 2025

He tweeted, “As an athlete, I’ve been in locker rooms my entire adult life and uh, that’s not locker-room talk.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 13, 2025

The book, published in 1974, had been long been criticized by some parents for its modest locker-room talk and anti-authority worldview — and enjoyed by the young in part for the same reasons.

From New York Times ● May 1, 2024

But the third daughter, who had become a feminist in the wake of her divorce, said she considered such locker-room entertainments offensive.

From "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents" by Julia Alvarez