cleanliness

See Also: ORDER/DISORDER

1. Clean and smooth as a peeled onion —O. Henry
2. Clean and well-kept as a cemetery —Karl Shapiro
3. (Her face) clean and white as a handkerchief —John Ashbery
4. Clean as a Band-Aid —Max Apple
5. Clean as a bleached bone —Wallace Stegner
6. Clean as a convent cell —Vita Sackville-West
7. Clean as a hound’s tooth —American colloquialism, attributed to New England
8. (His heart felt) clean as a new green leaf —Stephen Vincent Benet
9. Clean as a New England kitchen —Anon
10. Clean as a newly laundered sheet —Rosamund Pilcher

    Pilcher uses the “Clean as a sheet” simile to describe the smoothness and cleanliness of sand when the tide is out in a story entitled The White Birds.

11. Clean as a new pin of every penny of debt —Sir Walter Scott
12. Clean as a penny —William Robertson

    A much used simile to describe anyone who is neatly and cleanly dressed.

13. Clean as a pig’s whistle —American colloquialism, attributed to New England

    Just plain “Clean as a whistle,” is said to stem from the fact that it takes a clean dry whistle to produce a good sound.

14. Clean as a piglet bathed in milk —Mary Gordon
15. Clean as a rose is after rain —James Whitcomb Riley
16. Clean as a toilet bowl —Lincoln Kirstein
17. (The woman was as) clean as a white rose in the morning gauze of dew —Carl Sandburg
18. Clean as driftwood —Robert Hass
19. (Legs) clean as marble —Beryl Markham
20. Clean as new grass when the old grass burns —Carl Sandburg
21. Clean as water pouring from a silver tap —Tennessee Williams
22. Dirty as a glass roof in a train station —Leonard Cohen
23. Dust balls sail like galleons [on a carpet] on the dry sea —Robert Irwin
24. Fingernails … like watch crystals —Walker Percy
25. Immaculate as a laboratory —Ben Ames Williams
26. Spotless as naked innocence —John Smith
27. The water’s (of swimming pool) like bouillabaisse. It’s got more things in it than Macy’s window —Noël Coward