Well-oiled

adj

adj ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Well-run; smoothrunning; efficiently run. idiomatic

    "Pro-Trump political influencers have spent years building a well-oiled media machine that swarms around every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition."

  2. 2
    Drunk. idiomatic

    "Well, in 2000, a pair of well-oiled strangers hit the news and were arrested – after groping each other and undressing on a transatlantic flight – but it’s usually less extreme, as with the couple who were intensely snogging in 2020."

  3. 3
    Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see well, oiled.

Synonyms

All synonyms
;a sheet in the winda sheet in the wind's eyeadrian quistadripaled up

Antonyms

All antonyms
sober

Example

More examples

"Fadil's prostitution house ran like a well-oiled machine."

Etymology

The figurative sense of "smoothrunning" is an extension from the literal sense involving lubrication.

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