closeted

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

   Not open about one's sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity.

   • 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. 2

   Not open about some aspect of one's identity, tendency, or fondness

   Not open about some aspect of one's identity, tendency, or fondness; secret.

   • […] the remaining quotations, chiefly from English poetry, interested me only slightly more. They were the elegiac favourites of a closeted Romantic.
   • Now he feels a connection between his own closeted, esoteric sufferings and strivings and those of the poor urban working people all around him.
   • Sokolsky asks if he realizes that this is a walk-in clinic for closeted reality benders, and he's a disaster-response coordinator, not a therapist.
3. 3

   simple past and past participle of closet

4. ›+ 2 more definitionsshow fewer

   1. 4

      Confined.

      • He's spent all day closeted in his room.
      • After they had been closeted up with the fortune-teller for some time, I knew by their looks, upon their returning, that they had been promised something great.
   2. 5

      sheltered

      sheltered; protected.

      • 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

The neighborhood

• neighborcome out of the closet