poison-pen

adjective

poi·​son-pen ˈpȯi-zᵊn-ˈpen 

: written with malice and spite and usually anonymously

a poison-pen letter

Examples of poison-pen in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Long before Robert Altman’s The Player skewered 90s-era Hollywood, The Bad and the Beautiful was the industry’s great poison-pen letter to itself. — Erik Morse, Vogue, 23 Oct. 2025

There were plenty of poison-pen letters and plenty of murders, but there was not much mystery and there was very little pain. — Yiyun Li, New Yorker, 15 June 2025

This one rewards not the production or performance but specifically the poison-pen songwriting that ethered Drake. — August Brown, Los Angeles Times, 3 Feb. 2025

While Third Point is known by many for its poison-pen letters, that was the Third Point of 15 years ago. — Kenneth Squire, CNBC, 1 Feb. 2025

Spector’s hilarious poison-pen satire of educational wokeism has led us to that point with great care. — Jesse Green, New York Times, 17 Dec. 2024

Each story came out in recent days before reports surfaced that his own mother sent him a poison-pen email accusing him of being a serial abuser of women and something of a cad. — Philip Elliott, TIME, 4 Dec. 2024

The story of this poison-pen scandal is, in part, about the decline of a historical British way of life and social structure that had been tied up with the country’s sense of self as an imperial power. — Nicholas Quah, Vulture, 29 Mar. 2024

Would anyone care enough about a poison-pen letter to perform a DNA test? — Lucy Sante, The New Yorker, 11 Nov. 2023

Word History

First Known Use

1911, in the meaning defined above