dumpster fire

[duhmp-ster fahyer]

noun

1. a fire in a dumpster, or a large bin for refuse.

2. Slang.,  a situation, person, or thing that is disastrous and out of control.

   The team is turning into the biggest dumpster fire in the league.

Word History and Origins

Origin of dumpster fire¹

First recorded in 1955–60

Example Sentences

But the collective dumpster fire we got was worse than I had imagined.

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Mistakes probably won’t be punished by UCLA, which has been turned into a complete Dumpster fire by athletic director Martin Jarmond, but that’s another story for another day.

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There’s even an actual dumpster fire.

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I think of all three justices in the liberal minority as attempting not so much to dismantle the house on 1 First St. as to find some voice with which to express how profoundly weird it must be to don black robes, write impeccable footnotes, and attend summer circuit conferences with many red-faced judges in bow ties—and to do all of these things with good shoes and flossed teeth, while nobody out there talks about the dumpster fire raging in courts across the country.

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Uh, because it keeps the world from becoming a flaming dumpster fire.

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When To Use

What does dumpster fire mean?

Dumpster fire is a negative slang term for a situation that’s completely disastrous.It typically implies that such a situation is out of control and is very unlikely to be fixed. It’s often used to refer to situations that are disastrous due to extreme incompetence or negligence.The term can also be applied to people, groups, or things that are in the midst of utter chaos or irredeemable failure, as in They haven’t won a single game—they’re a complete dumpster fire this year. It’s especially used in a mocking way. This figurative sense of dumpster fire is based on its literal meaning: a fire inside a dumpster, which is a large trash container designed to be lifted and emptied by a garbage truck.A literal dumpster fire is often caused accidentally, and the same goes for the figurative sense of the term—it’s usually used to refer to disastrous situations that weren’t intended to be that way. Some dumpster fires are self-contained, while others can spread to things around them (this also holds true for both the literal and figurative senses of the term).The slang sense of dumpster fire implies that the situation was bad to begin with (a pile of garbage) and has now become even worse (a pile of garbage on fire). This might also imply that it’s not worth fixing.Example: Poor attendance, technical difficulties, offensive gaffes, and food poisoning—the conference was a dumpster fire.