kibosh

noun

ki·​bosh ˈkī-ˌbäsh  kī-ˈbäsh 

ki-ˈbäsh

: something that serves as a check or stop

—usually used in the phrase put the kibosh on

Inevitably, though, another recession will come putting the kibosh on job and income growth …

—Joseph Spiers

kibosh transitive verb

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The Mysterious Origins of Kibosh

Evidence of kibosh dates the word to only a few years before Charles Dickens used it in an 1836 sketch, but despite kibosh being relatively young its source is elusive. Claims were once made that it was Yiddish, despite the absence of a plausible Yiddish source. Another hypothesis pointed to the Irish term caidhp bhais, literally, “coif (or cap) of death,” explained as headgear a judge put on when pronouncing a death sentence, or as a covering pulled over the face of a corpse when a coffin was closed. But evidence for any metaphorical use of this phrase in Irish is lacking, and kibosh is not recorded in English as spoken in Ireland until decades after Dickens’s use. More recent source theories include a heraldic term for an animal’s head when born with only its face fully showing, and an Arabic word meaning “whip, lash,” but as the note at our etymology explains, no theory has sufficient evidence to back it.

Examples of kibosh in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Once again, the Supreme Court put a kibosh on the scheme, holding that the city failed to demonstrate the demands were proportional to any impact caused by the development. —James Burling, Oc Register, 25 Sep. 2025

The state’s voters in 2018, and a Colorado Supreme Court opinion issued 15 years before that, put a kibosh on redistricting in the state outside the usual post-census cycle that happens every decade. —Nick Coltrain, Denver Post, 21 Sep. 2025

Add to that the general instability in politics and global economics, the various wars, acts of terror and violence and...I’d just really like to travel back in time to the 90s and put a kibosh on the whole thing. —Erik Kain, Forbes.com, 31 July 2025

Detroit Axle sought, and was denied, a motion for a preliminary injunction against the kibosh on de minimis. —Kate Nishimura, Sourcing Journal, 29 July 2025

Word History

Etymology

of obscure origin

Note: A number of etymologies are summarized by Anatoly Liberman in online postings to the OUPblog maintained by Oxford University Press ("Unable to put the kibosh on a hard word," May 19, 2010; "Monthly gleanings," July 28, 2010; "Three recent theories of 'kibosh'," August 14, 2013; "Etymology gleanings," November 29, 2017). The recent theories to which he alludes see the following as sources for kibosh: the heraldic term caboched, caboshed "(of an animal's head) borne full-face without the neck showing"; kibosh as a term for an iron bar used by clogmakers in the north of England (apparently first attested in 1860); Arabic kurbāj, kirbāj "whip, lash" and its source, Turkish kırbaç. The latter hypothesis is argued at length in a monograph by Gerald Cohen, Stephen Goranson and Matthew Little, Origin of Kibosh (Routledge, 2017), which also summarizes recently found antedatings to citations of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary (dating the word with certainty to 1834, and perhaps to 1830). Pace the authors' enthusiasm, the Arabic/Turkish origin is questionable: if Charles Dickens' 1835 recording of the word as "kye-bosh" accurately reflects the vowel and accent of the first syllable (according with the current pronunciation), the phonetic gap between the source and the English word is difficult to bridge; and the authors suggest no mechanism by which an assumed loanword from the eastern Mediterranean could have found its way into the speech of lower London social strata. Liberman may well be correct that "with the present evidence at our disposal, the chance of unearthing the origin of kibosh is vanishingly small."

First Known Use

1830, in the meaning defined above

Phrases Containing kibosh

• put the kibosh on

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Kids Definition

kibosh

noun

ki·​bosh ˈkī-ˌbäsh 

: end entry 1 sense 2a, stop

—used in the phrase put the kibosh on