gasket
Americannoun
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a rubber, metal, or rope ring, for packing a piston or placing around a joint to make it watertight.
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Nautical. any of a number of light lines for securing a furled sail to a boom, gaff, or yard.
noun
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a compressible packing piece of paper, rubber, asbestos, etc, sandwiched between the faces or flanges of a joint to provide a seal
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nautical a piece of line used as a sail stop
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slang to burst out in anger
Etymology
Origin of gasket
1615–25; perhaps < French garcette a plait of rope
Explanation
A piece of rubber that's used to fill the bit of space between two parts of an engine is called a gasket. If your car has an oil leak, with any luck you'll just need to replace a gasket. The job of a gasket is to prevent leaks and form a seal between two surfaces, usually the parts of a machine or system. Plumbing requires gaskets to prevent water seeping between pipes and fittings, and your car relies on its head gasket, which sits between the cylinder head and engine block, to keep it running. Colloquially, to "blow a gasket" means to get furious or extremely upset.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Simmons pointed to the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, which was linked to the failure of a rubber gasket in cold temperatures.
From Science Daily • May 13, 2026
Hibs - hanging on brilliantly against the odds, heading everything clear, throwing bodies in the way of shots, blowing a gasket to protect their point in front of an electrified home and away crowd.
From BBC • Apr. 27, 2026
Calm down, ChatGPT — if you blow a gasket, OpenAI is in real trouble.
From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 26, 2026
On the Alto K98M, that click-clackiness is muffled by a rubbery internal gasket surrounding the keys.
From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 23, 2025
At the Rad Lab, Wilson contributed ingenious improvements to the cyclotron, among them a rubber gasket allowing probes to be inserted and withdrawn from the chamber without compromising the vacuum.
From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
