What does "kitchen-sinky" mean?

Inclusive of too wide a variety of features or items, typically with a resulting trade-off in efficiency or usefulness.

Kitchen-sinky

adj, slang

adj, slang ·Uncommon ·College level

Adjective

1
Inclusive of too wide a variety of features or items, typically with a resulting trade-off in efficiency or usefulness. form-of, inclusive, informal
"Don't buy a [back]pack with loads of extra kitchen sinky bits unless you'll be using them frequently."
2
Of or pertaining to the kitchen sink drama; depicting social realities in an unstylized and direct manner.
"Not that Warner's is merely a domesticated version of Euripides. It stars, after all, that least kitchen-sinky of actors."

"Don't buy a [back]pack with loads of extra kitchen sinky bits unless you'll be using them frequently."

From kitchen sink + -y. Sense 1 alludes to the phrase everything but the kitchen sink, sense 2 to the phrase kitchen sink realism.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.