kitchen sink

The story

The noun is derived from kitchen + sink. Sense 2.1 (“miscellaneous item or miscellany”) is probably from everything but the kitchen sink. The adjective is derived from the noun. Sense 1 (“of or pertaining to a realist style of painting characterized by scenes of dull or untidy domestic interiors of urban working-class people”) was coined by the British art critic David Sylvester (1924–2001) in a December 1954 article entitled “The Kitchen Sink”: see the quotation. The verb is a back-formation from kitchen-sinking (noun), which is derived from the noun.