Meaning
Money spent with nothing to show for it, wasted or irretrievably lost; the wider phrase covers any effort, work or opportunity squandered just as completely. It pictures resources vanishing like water carried off by a drain, typically through a bad purchase, a failed project or pointless recurring spending. Informal; a complaining or warning register, often deployed about someone else's spending decisions. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The imagery is domestic plumbing: whatever is washed down a drain is gone for good, so wasteful spending can be pictured as literally pouring money into the waste pipe. Dating the fixed phrase is harder than explaining it, and the major historical dictionaries I could verify give no accessible first citation. The Idioms, quoting an American Heritage-style note, marks it '[Colloquial; c. 1920]' with first mentions in the early 1900s, a timing consistent with the spread of plumbed kitchens and bathrooms. Its younger cousin 'down the tubes' is an Americanism of the early 1960s that, per the OED as discussed by Grammarphobia, is explicitly related to it - the tubes being understood as sewer pipes. British speakers reach for parallel forms such as 'down the pan' or 'down the plughole'.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- down the drain
- gone down the drain
- pour money down the drain
- throw money down the drain
Usage Examples
- Paying for storage units full of furniture nobody wants is money down the drain, month after month.
- Without proper maintenance, the new stadium will be money down the drain within a decade.
- All those unwatched streaming subscriptions were money down the drain, so she cancelled three of them at once.