''cabinet'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260717141042-00-⌔

cabinet - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

cabinet (plural cabinets)

🖼️ ➺

• A storage closet either separate from, or built into, a wall.
• A cupboard.
  • ✤ ‘ […] There’s every Staffordshire crime-piece ever made in this cabinet, and that’s unique. The Van Hoyer Museum in New York hasn’t that very rare second version of Maria Marten’s Red Barn over there, nor the little Frederick George Manning—he was the criminal Dickens saw hanged on the roof of the gaol in Horsemonger Lane, by the way—’¹
• A museum display case.
  • ✤ Here I obtained the rare and beautiful swallow-tail butterflies, Papilio aenomaus and P. liris; the males of which are quite unlike each other, and belong in fact to distinct sections of the genus, while the females are so much alike that they are undistinguishable on the wing, and to an uneducated eye equally so in the cabinet.²
• (figuratively) A source of valuable things; a storehouse.
  • ✤ It is a perfect cabinet of faithful, valuable, and extensive information; and it ought to have a place on the shelves of the most select and compact library, and be in the possession of every private family, as a work both of valuable reference.³
• The upright assembly that houses a coin-operated arcade game, a cab.
• (historical) A size of photograph, specifically one measuring 3⅞”by 5½”.
  • ✤ Holmes took a note of it. “One other question,” said he. “Was the photograph a cabinet?”⁴
• A group of advisors to a government or business entity.
• (politics, often capitalized) In parliamentary and some other systems of government, the group of ministers responsible for creating government policy and for overseeing the departments comprising the executive branch.
  • ✤ Lincoln had a great deal of trouble with his Cabinet because some of them got it into their heads that they, and not the President, were the policy-makers. James K. Polk had the same difficulty with his Cabinet. Franklin Roosevelt never had any difficulty with his Cabinet for the simple reason that he himself, in my opinion, spent too much time doing the work that should have been delegated to the Cabinet.⁵
  • (Kentucky) A cabinet-level agency in the executive branch; that is, an agency headed by a member of the governor’s cabinet.
    • ✤ The executive branch of Kentucky state government is structured on a program cabinet system consisting of 14 program cabinets, each headed by a secretary, who is appointed by the Governor. The program cabinets listed below and the agencies within each cabinet are designated in the statutes.⁶
• (archaic) A small chamber or private room.
  • ✤ Philip passed some hours every day in his father’s cabinet.⁷
• (often capitalized) A collection of art or ethnographic objects.
• (dialectal, Rhode Island) Milkshake.
  • ✤ One of Rhode Island’s most famous beverages is the Awful Awful, an enormous 32-ounce, rich, creamy milk shake sold at the Newport Creamery stores, a soda fountain and casual restaurant chain. This ultra-thick cabinet is “awful big and awful good,” thus the name.⁸
• (obsolete) A hut; a cottage; a small house.
  • ✤ Hearken a while from thy green cabinet,/The rural song of careful Colinet.⁹
• An enclosure for mechanical or electrical equipment.

Etymology

From cabin +‎ -et, influenced by French cabinet. In sense of “a government group”, compare salon, also named for a room used to gather.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈkæb.ɪ.nɪt/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• (General American) IPA: /ˈkæb.ɪ.nɪt/, /ˈkæb.nɪt/
  • (weak vowel merger) IPA: /ˈkæb.ə.nət/, /ˈkæb.nət/
• (General American, weak vowel merger) Rhymes: -æbnət
• (Australian) IPA: /ˈkæb.nət/

Printed 2026-07-17.

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Footnotes

1. 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 3, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC: ↩

2. 1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume I, London: Macmillan and Co., page 297: ↩

3. 1844 August, “Notices of New Works: The Travels of Marco Polo, greatly Amended and Enlarged, from Valuable early Manuscripts recently published by the French Society of Geography, and[in] Italy, by Count Baldelli Boni […]. By Hugh Murray, F. R. S. E.”, in The Metropolitan, volume 40, London: Saunders and Otley, page 117: ↩

4. 1891, Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal In Bohemia, Norton, published 2005, page 19: ↩

5. 1955, Harry S Truman, Memoirs of Harry S. Truman: Year of Decisions ‎${}^{[1]}$, volume I, Signet Books, published 1965, →OCLC, →OL, page 364: ↩

6. 2003, A Handbook for Gubernatorial Transition in Kentucky ‎${}^{[2]}$, Legislative Research Commission, page 49: ↩

7. 1855–1858, William H[ickling] Prescott, History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain, volume, Boston, Mass.: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, →OCLC: ↩

8. 2012, Linda Beaulieu, Providence & Rhode Island Cookbook: Big Recipes from the Smallest State, page 268: ↩

9. 1579, Immeritô [pseudonym; Edmund Spenser], “December. Ægloga Duodecima.”, in The Shepheardes Calender: […], London: […] Iohn Wolfe for Iohn Harrison the yonger, […], →OCLC: ↩