Skeleton in the Closet: What the Phrase Means and Where It Comes From

The meaning has stayed steady. Collins gives the family-scandal sense and the wider sense of any damaging secret, and the Cambridge Dictionary puts it more briefly as "an embarrassing secret." People use it about individuals, families, companies and public figures: a politician with skeletons in the closet is someone with a past that might not survive daylight.

The plural is just as common as the singular. A person can have "a skeleton in the closet" or "skeletons in the closet," and when the secrets come out, people often say the skeletons came tumbling out. The image does the work. A skeleton is what is left of a person after everything else is gone, and a closet is where you put the things you do not want guests to see.

The phrase turns up in print earlier than many people expect. Gary Martin of Phrase Finder identifies an 1816 use by William Hendry Stowell in *The Eclectic Review*: "The dread of being the cause of misery to posterity has prevailed over men to conceal the skeleton in the closet." Stowell was writing about hereditary disease. His skeleton was a figure of speech for an inherited illness that families hid, not a set of bones in a cabinet.

A year earlier, in 1815, a lecture by the physician Joseph Adams reportedly used the words "to conceal the skeleton in the closet" in the same sense, about hiding a family history of hereditary disease. That record is reported by Mental Floss, and it points to the same early meaning: the skeleton as a family's hidden inheritance.

The Oxford English Dictionary, as Mental Floss reports it, gives 1845 as its earliest record of the expression, in a piece by Thackeray in the magazine *Punch* about a skeleton in every house. Thackeray came back to the idea a few years later in *The History of Pendennis*, published in parts from 1848 to 1850: "Every house has its skeleton in it somewhere."

So, the dates depend on who is counting. Mental Floss reports Adams in 1815, Phrase Finder gives Stowell in 1816, and the earliest record in the OED is 1845. Collins credits Thackeray with popularizing a phrase that was already in use, which fits all three. The best reading of the record is a metaphor that grew gradually in the early nineteenth century, with no known inventor.

Because the phrase is so vivid, people have looked for a real skeleton behind it. Three explanations come up most often, and each is best treated as a theory.

The medical theory, often told as the body-snatching story, starts in Britain before the Anatomy Act of 1832. Anatomists and medical students were short of legally available bodies to study, and so-called resurrectionists supplied bodies taken from graves. It was a secret trade and a publicly condemned one, and the people taken from those graves were somebody's parents, children and neighbors. It is plausible that anatomical remains were kept hidden in storerooms or cupboards, as Mental Floss notes, but no documented chain shows that body snatching created the idiom. If historic medical collections interest you, our story on the Mütter Museum skulls looks at one.

The literary theory points to Gothic stories of hidden corpses, secret rooms and concealed shame. One proposed influence is Bluebeard, the French tale recorded by Charles Perrault in 1697, in which Bluebeard's wife opens a forbidden room and finds the bodies of his earlier wives. Gothic fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries supplied plenty of similar scenes. Bluebeard is a likely relative of the image, not a proven origin of the phrase.

The hereditary-disease reading has the earliest direct evidence, since both Adams in 1815 and Stowell in 1816 used the skeleton as a figure for an inherited illness a family kept quiet. The fairest summary is that the image may have drawn on all of these: family disgrace, Gothic fiction and an awareness of secret anatomy. The doctor story makes a good tale, but it remains a theory rather than the established origin.

Both are right; they belong to different varieties of English. British English keeps the skeleton in the cupboard, and the World English Historical Dictionary cross-references "skeleton in the cupboard" under its entry for cupboard. American English keeps it in the closet. The secret is the same either way.

The British form even made it onto a famous title page. W. Somerset Maugham called his 1930 novel *Cakes and Ale, or the Skeleton in the Cupboard*, published in London by William Heinemann, as the Huntington Library records.

Once the phrase was settled in the language, writers and musicians borrowed it. Maugham's subtitle is the best-known literary example. In 1936, Louis Armstrong recorded "The Skeleton in the Closet" with Jimmy Dorsey and His Orchestra, a song with music by Arthur Johnston and lyrics by Johnny Burke, associated with the film *Pennies from Heaven* and catalogued by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Half a century later the skeleton went heavy. Anthrax put "A Skeleton in the Closet" on *Among the Living*, released March 22, 1987, and the album page at Nuclear Blast lists it as track five. From a Victorian novel to a jazz trumpet to a thrash guitar, the skeleton has had a busy career for something that was supposed to stay hidden.

Spanish has both direct versions of the English phrase and idioms of its own. "Tener esqueletos en el armario" and "tener esqueletos en el clóset" are understood adaptations of the English expression. The Real Academia Española defines armario as a cupboard or wardrobe and clóset as an American Spanish word for a built-in wardrobe, which is why clóset is the common choice in much of Latin America.

So, what does "tener esqueletos en el clóset" mean? It means keeping shameful secrets, family scandals or past events hidden, just like a skeleton in the closet. The Cambridge English-Spanish Dictionary gives the idiom "tener trapos sucios," to have dirty laundry. Other equivalents are "tener un muerto en el armario," "tener secretos vergonzosos" and "tener algo que ocultar." The best choice depends on the region and on how formal the conversation is.

If the skeleton feels too dramatic for the moment, English has quieter options. A shameful secret, a hidden scandal, dirty laundry and a secret from the past all cover similar ground, and British speakers can always move the skeleton into the cupboard. The skeleton version earns its place when the secret is old, personal and the kind of thing that might come out at the worst possible time.

A few more short answers about where the skeleton came from.

If you like the way skeletons have crept into everyday English, the skeleton has another job in your house: our story on why it is called a skeleton key explains the key stripped to its bare bones. For why a skeleton stands for death and secrets in the first place, see what a skull symbolizes, and for the real frame behind the metaphor, how many bones are in the human body. And if the skeleton in your closet seems to be grinning at you, why skeletons look like they're smiling has the answer.

---