dinner jacket

plural dinner jackets · alternative dinner-jacket

1. USespeciallyA jacket, often white, corresponding to a tuxedo jacket.

   He was dressed in a gray dinner jacket and matching trousers.

   2012, Tan Twan Eng, chapter 10, in The Garden of Evening Mists, Hachette, page 126

   1 more example

   Constant was fully dressed in blue-green evening shorts and a dinner jacket of gold brocade.

   1959, Kurt Vonnegut, chapter 2, in The Sirens of Titan, New York: Dial, published 2006, page 49

2. UKThe formal suit, typically black, that includes this type of jacket.

   It was a dinner-jacket evening—not tails, because they would only be three—and though he had respected such niceties for years he found them suddenly ridiculous.

   1971, E. M. Forster, chapter 37, in Maurice, Penguin, published 1972, page 162

   2 more examples

   [They] sat in a pen in the corner, smoking cigarettes and reading magazines; four or five girls in black silk dresses and the same number of slight effeminate young men in dinner-jackets.

   1932, Nevil Shute, chapter 2, in Lonely Road

   Mr Lackersteen was even wearing a dinner-jacket—white, because of the season—and was completely sober. The boiled shirt and piqué waistcoat seemed to hold him upright and stiffen his moral fibre like a breastplate.

   1934 October, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], “Chapter 17”, in Burmese Days, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, →OCLC

   Synonyms: black tie, penguin suit