Closeted
adj, verb, slang ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 simple past and past participle of closet form-of, participle, past
- 1 Not open about one's sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity. informal
"Sally Gearhart, an ex-christian from Illinois who in the early seventies abandoned closeted lesbianism on Midwestern church college faculties for radical feminism in San Francisco,"
- 2 Confined. not-comparable
"He's spent all day closeted in his room."
- 3 Not open about some aspect of one's identity, tendency, or fondness; secret. broadly
"[…] the remaining quotations, chiefly from English poetry, interested me only slightly more. They were the elegiac favourites of a closeted Romantic."
- 4 sheltered; protected. not-comparable
"In my salubrious constituency of Cheltenham and in the leafy lanes of Gloucestershire, we are perhaps somewhat closeted from these unpleasant and harsh realities of the urban world of London, Plymouth, Birmingham and other major cities"
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"He closeted himself in his study."
Etymology
From closet (“state of concealment”) + -ed.
See closet (verb)
Related phrases
More for "closeted"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.