kitchen [OE] An Old English word based on Latin coquere ‘to cook’. Everything but the kitchen sink, meaning ‘everything imaginable’, seems to have started life in the Second World War. A 1948 dictionary of forces’ slang says that it was used in the context of a heavy bombardment: ‘They chucked everything they’d got at us except, or including, the kitchen sink.’ Kitchen-sink drama refers in particular to post-war British drama which used working-class domestic settings rather than the drawing rooms of conventional middle-class theatre.