wastebasket
Americannoun
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of wastebasket
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.
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Shareholders get so little in settlement that most never collect their damages; their claim forms end up in the wastebasket.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 29, 2026
Do it once, but make sure to sit beside a wastebasket.
From Salon ● Oct. 4, 2025
These commitments are important, as they give Kennedy something to wad up and christen his wastebasket with when he steps into his new office.
From Slate ● Feb. 8, 2025
This trend should be in the same wastebasket as mullets, microwave dinners and inflated lips.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 6, 2024
I was lying on the bed and lifted my head until I could see my wastebasket.
From "145th Street: Short Stories" by Walter Dean Myers
As a housemate, he was catastrophic—overturning wastebaskets, ransacking drawers and drenching manuscripts.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 23, 2026
When that happens, residents are forced to defecate in wastebaskets in their rooms and then, he said, take “the walk of shame” to deposit their feces in hallway trash rooms.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 16, 2023
She herself had emptied the wastebaskets as a little girl.
From Seattle Times ● Nov. 5, 2022
As Politico first reported in 2018, aides constantly had to fish torn bits of paper out of wastebaskets and painstakingly reassemble them.
From Washington Post ● Feb. 10, 2022
The hat was the first of myriad lines of signature products: toys, commemorative wastebaskets, two varieties of oranges.
From "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand
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.
