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View synonyms for

dirty work

noun

  1. disagreeable, often tedious tasks.
  2. any illegal or dishonest dealing.


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Idioms and Phrases

An unpleasant, distasteful, or thankless task or job. For example, Jane complained that she had to do all the dirty work while her colleagues took long vacations . [First half of 1900s]
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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

Coach JJ Redick has referred to it multiple times regarding role players, but stars such as LeBron James and Luka Doncic know doing the dirty work leads to winning.

From

The other side of the detective’s profile has him strolling between the starched propriety of upper-class society and the sooty underbelly, doing rich men’s dirty work.

From

“The Los Angeles Police Department did the dirty work,” Gochez said.

From

The assumption in those early days was that the Project 2025 people, led by soon-to-be Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, would be doing the dirty work, such as implementing Schedule F, the order to make all federal workers into at-will employees.

From

“At least when the court went off base in the past, it left a record so posterity could see how it went wrong,” Jackson wrote, castigating her colleagues for smuggling through their dirty work on the shadow docket.

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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.

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