"Skeleton in the Closet" | Origin
Reviewed by Gavin Meiring, Lead research and primary author · Doctoral Candidate (Corporate Governance) · Research and drafting assisted by AI
- The phrase is recorded in Britain from the early 19th century — the British form is 'skeleton in the cupboard', while Americans say 'closet'.
- The leading explanation points to the Anatomy Act of 1832, which tightened the rules on dissection: doctors could only keep skeletons for study by hiding them away — the hidden skeleton became the image of a shameful secret.
- Whatever the precise trigger, by the 1840s 'a skeleton in the closet' had become the standard term for a family's hidden disgrace.
Skeleton in the Closet
"Skeleton in the closet" (or "skeleton in the cupboard" in British English) refers to a shameful or embarrassing secret from someone's past that they would rather keep hidden. Every family or public figure is sometimes said to have a skeleton in the closet, meaning a dark or inconvenient truth that would be damaging if revealed. This page traces the phrase's documented history and examines the theories about its origin.
How to Use This Page
Read the history section for the earliest documented uses of this phrase and the plausible explanations for its imagery. The modern usage section gives examples across everyday speech and public life. The similar phrases section covers related idioms for hidden secrets and shameful pasts.
The History
The phrase "skeleton in the cupboard" appears in British English from the early nineteenth century, with some of the earliest written examples found in a satirical essay from 1816 and in William Makepeace Thackeray's writing in the 1840s. Thackeray's usage in "The Newcomes" (1855), where he uses the phrase to describe a family secret, helped establish it in Victorian literary English. In American English, "closet" replaced "cupboard" as the standard term, and both versions remain in use today in their respective regional varieties.
The imagery of the phrase draws on two plausible explanations. The first is a dark historical suggestion that families concealing a death might have literally hidden a body to avoid scandal, particularly in cases of suicide (which carried social stigma) or medical experimentation in the era before body donation was regulated. Medical students in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sometimes kept skeletal remains for study, and the possession of such material was considered shameful enough to hide.
The second and more likely explanation is straightforwardly metaphorical: the skeleton, representing death and the past, hidden in a place of concealment (a cupboard or closet), is a vivid image for any shameful secret from one's history that one prefers to keep locked away out of sight. The image did not need to correspond to a literal practice to be effective as a metaphor.
By the latter half of the nineteenth century the phrase was in wide circulation in both British and American English and has remained fully established since.
A dated timeline
The attestations below are the ones most often cited for this phrase, in date order. A dated citation is worth more than a story about the phrase's origin, because a citation can be checked and a story cannot.
| Year | Source | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| 1816 | William Hendry Stowell, The Eclectic Review (monthly periodical) | Earliest reference in print that is usually cited, and figurative rather than literal |
| 1832 | Anatomy Act, United Kingdom | Ends the era of body snatching by widening the legal supply of corpses for dissection |
| 1845 | William Makepeace Thackeray, piece in Punch | The related wording "a skeleton in every house" |
| 1845 | Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat | The Gothic device of a hidden body behind brickwork, not the phrase itself |
| 1854 to 1855 | William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcomes | The explicit "a skeleton or two in their closets", the usage that carried the phrase into general English |
| 1960s onward | American English usage | "Coming out of the closet" develops from the same imagery and acquires its distinct modern sense |
The 1816 entry deserves a closer look, because it is the earliest one and it is easy to misread. The source is a piece by William Hendry Stowell in The Eclectic Review, and the sentence runs: "The dread of being the cause of misery to posterity has prevailed over men to conceal the skeleton in the closet." The passage pairs the image with "the danger of contagion and the apprehension of hereditary diseases". Read in context, the skeleton stands for hereditary disease rather than for a body or a crime.
That single detail settles one question and sharpens another. It confirms the phrase was figurative from its first appearance in print, which weakens the literal hidden-body explanation as the phrase's origin. It also shows how far the meaning has travelled: what began as a private fear about illness in the family now covers fraud, affairs, convictions and anything else a person would rather not discuss.
The body-snatcher theory and what the record shows
The most repeated origin story for this phrase is the medical one. Before the Anatomy Act of 1832, British medical schools had a legal supply of corpses far smaller than the demand, and body snatchers dug up fresh graves to fill the gap. The story then runs that doctors kept the resulting skeletons in cupboards at home, and the phrase grew from the need to hide them.
The theory is a good story and the record does not support it. Researchers who have looked for corroboration report finding none, and the chronology works against it as well: the phrase appears in print in 1816, a date that sits before the peak of the body-snatching trade rather than after it.
Two facts make the metaphorical reading the stronger one. The first is the 1816 usage above, where the skeleton is a disease and there is no body at all. The second is that a metaphor of concealment needs no literal practice behind it. A skeleton in a cupboard is a picture of something dead that is close at hand and out of sight, and that picture works whether or not anyone ever stored bones in the furniture.
Where a phrase's origin is genuinely unclear, the honest answer separates three things: what the record attests, what scholars infer from it, and what remains a story. For this phrase the record attests the 1816 periodical reference and the Thackeray usages. The medical explanation is inference that the evidence does not carry. The remaining details are repetition.
How a phrase origin gets established
Phrase histories are built from dated quotations, and the method explains both the strength and the gaps in any origin claim. A dictionary entry needs a quotation with a date and a source, which is why the 1816 Eclectic Review reference and the 1854 to 1855 Newcomes reference appear in every serious account of this phrase while the body-snatching story appears in none.
The limit of the method is worth stating: the earliest use found is not the earliest use that ever happened. Speech runs ahead of print, and a phrase that reaches a periodical in 1816 was probably in spoken use before that. Dating a phrase means dating its first surviving appearance on paper, which is a floor rather than a precise figure.
A second limit is the difference between a phrase and its imagery. The Gothic novelists of the Victorian period used hidden corpses as a device repeatedly, and Poe's The Black Cat in 1845 is the best-known example. A shared image is not the same thing as a shared phrase, and treating the fiction as evidence for the idiom's origin is where several popular accounts go wrong.
Two habits make an origin claim checkable. Ask for a dated quotation rather than a narrative, and ask whether a source is describing the earliest known use or repeating an explanation that has been passed around. Where a claim is repeated widely but traces back to no quotation, treat it as legend until a citation appears.
The words that cover the same ground
English has a small family of terms for hidden shame, and they are not interchangeable. Each one carries a different register and a different implication about who knows.
| Phrase | What it implies | Register |
|---|---|---|
| Skeleton in the closet | A specific secret that would damage the person if exposed | Everyday, slightly colourful |
| Skeleton in the cupboard | The same meaning, British form of the above | Everyday, British |
| Dirty laundry | Private matters aired in public, often disputes rather than a single secret | Informal, often plural matters |
| Past indiscretions | Behaviour the person regrets but that may already be known | Formal, softening |
| Buried secrets | Something deliberately concealed, with no hint that exposure is likely | Neutral, plain |
| Come out of the closet | Disclosure rather than concealment, now mainly used of sexual orientation | Informal, specific |
The distinction that catches people out is between a secret and a disclosure. "Skeleton in the closet" describes something being kept hidden, and "coming out of the closet" describes the moment that hiding ends. The second grew from the imagery of the first, and the two now read as opposites in ordinary use.
Why two versions of the word survive
British English prefers "cupboard" and American English prefers "closet", and the split has a practical cause. In British English a "closet" came to mean a water closet, a lavatory, which made the American form read oddly to British ears and pushed British usage toward "cupboard". American English kept the older sense of a closet as a small private storage room. Both forms are correct in their own variety, and the meaning is identical.
How It Is Used Today
In personal contexts: "Every family has a skeleton in the closet. Ours is that grandfather was twice convicted of fraud."
In political commentary: "Investigative journalists spent months searching for skeletons in the candidate's closet before the election."
In business: "Before completing a major acquisition, companies conduct thorough due diligence to uncover any skeletons in the closet."
Similar Phrases
"Dirty laundry" refers to private matters that are embarrassing if revealed, particularly family disputes or personal failures. "Past indiscretions" is the more formal, less vivid equivalent. "Coming out of the closet" was originally a variation on the same imagery before acquiring its primary modern sense. "Buried secrets" is the plain equivalent.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is "skeleton in the cupboard" or "skeleton in the closet" correct? Both are correct. British English traditionally uses "cupboard," while American English uses "closet." The meaning is identical. In the modern era, American usage has become more globally dominant, and "closet" is increasingly used in international English.
Did people really hide skeletons in cupboards? The imagery may have roots in real practices: concealing deaths to avoid scandal, or hiding medical specimens. However, the phrase is essentially metaphorical and does not require a literal practice to explain its origin. The image works powerfully on its own as a symbol of hidden shame.
Can a skeleton in the closet be a harmless secret? The phrase implies something genuinely embarrassing or damaging, not simply private. A harmless personal preference is not a skeleton in the closet. The phrase specifically suggests that revelation would cause shame, damage to reputation, or social consequences.
Is the phrase appropriate in formal contexts? The phrase is widely used in journalism and political commentary, making it acceptable in semi-formal writing. In strictly formal or legal writing, a more precise description of the specific issue would normally be used.
Also try these free tools related to Skeleton in the Closet: - Word Origins Hub
Sources for the dates above
The dated attestations are drawn from the Phrase Finder entry for this expression at https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/skeleton-in-the-closet.html, which lists the 1816 Eclectic Review reference, the Thackeray usages and the Anatomy Act of 1832. The Newcomes is in the public domain and the full text is available at Project Gutenberg, ebook 7467. Poe's The Black Cat is on Wikisource. For the dictionary record of the phrase, including competing etymologies, the reference work to consult is the Oxford English Dictionary.