Oxford English Dictionaries defines "laundry list" as follows:
A long or exhaustive list of people or things.
‘a laundry list of people and organizations that would have to be won over’
I'm confused by this phrase because I have never made a list of any length while doing laundry (my family and I have always done laundry on our own in our houses). Is there some cultural context I'm missing? How did this phrase come about?
Best Answer
Glossophilia
While the printed list seems to have arisen in the late Victorian era, the general concept is much older. Such a list plays an important role in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (called a "washing-bill"):
Northanger Abbey was the last published of Austen's extant novels (1817), but was actually written the earliest, with the manuscript apparently completed in 1803 (see Wikipedia). Such lists must have been commonplace, at least among certain classes, by the late eighteenth century when Austen was writing (and when the bill would have been left behind, in story time).
Figurative usage dates to at least 1940: