goldfish bowl

goldfish bowl noun

1. Also called: fishbowl a glass bowl, typically spherical, in which fish are kept as pets
2. a place or situation open to observation by onlookers

Idioms and Phrases with goldfish bowl goldfish bowl

A situation affording no privacy, as in Being in a goldfish bowl comes with the senator’s job—there’s no avoiding it. The glass bowl allowing one to view goldfish from every direction was transferred first, in the 1920s, to a police interrogation room equipped with a one-way mirror. By the mid-1900s the expression was being used more broadly.