redskirt

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noun

An unimportant or expendable female character, especially one introduced only to be killed in order to underscore the peril faced by important characters.

Scrabble 13
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Meanings

nounredskirt (plural redskirts)

plural redskirts

  1. rareslangfictionAn unimportant or expendable female character, especially one introduced only to be killed in order to underscore the peril faced by important characters.

    Wasn't there that episode where the aliens turned everyone into little blocks of styrofoam, and one of the aliens turned a redskirt and a redshirt into cubes and crumbled one of them? And then Scotty got really drunk. I seem to recall that the redskirt bought it that time.

    2007 February 10, Marc Goodman, “Re: Response to Steven Pinker's 'The Mystery of Consciousness'”, in alt.religion.kibology (Usenet)

Origin

From red + skirt. Patterned after redshirt, which derived from the tendency for male security officers, who wore red shirts, to die on episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series. Female crew members wore minidresses, but only one red-uniformed female character was killed during the series' run, in the episode "By Any Other Name."

Full word history & related roots →
Cite this entry
APA

redskirt. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/redskirt

MLA

“redskirt.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/redskirt. Accessed November 4, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “redskirt,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/redskirt.

Source: redskirt on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.