Do the dishes means to wash up after a meal: plates, cups, cutlery. In British English, the same thing is often called do the washing-up.
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do the dishes; do the washing-up (BrE); did (past)
- Whoever cooks dinner doesn't have to do the dishes afterwards.
- We take turns doing the dishes after every family meal.
- I hate doing the dishes by hand, so we bought a dishwasher.
What changed
First versionCan you do the dish after dinner tonight?
RevisionCan you do the dishes after dinner tonight?
It might seem natural to treat this as a single collective idea and say the dish, but the phrase is always plural, dishes, because it refers to the whole set of plates and cutlery together.
Don't confuse washing-up and washing: do the washing-up means to wash the dishes, while do the washing means to do the laundry: I'll do the washing-up if you do the washing.
Your turn
After the party, we spent an hour cleaning up and had to ___.
Show the answer
do the dishes — There's a lot of dirty crockery after a party, and washing it is always do the dishes, in the plural. The dish in the singular means one plate or bowl, or one particular food, like a pasta dish, so do the dish doesn't fit here.
Describe who washes the dishes in your home and after which meal this happens most often.
In our house my husband usually does the dishes, mostly after dinner, when there's the most to wash.
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