dirty joke

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Idioms and Phrases

A smutty story, as in Teenagers love to tell dirty jokes . The use of dirty in the sense of “obscene” or “indecent” dates from the late 1500s, but its application to a joke began only in the 20th century. The same sense also appears in such expressions as dirty book , for a pornographic book; dirty old man , for a middle-aged or elderly lecher; and dirty word or talk dirty , for a lewd, offensive expression or sexually explicit conversation.

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Example Sentences

Compliments would earn their deliverer a stream of invective, while an insult or dirty joke “would earn his respect.”

From The Daily Beast

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

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