Meanings
- pluralplural of shirt-sleeve
- alternativepluralplural onlyAlternative form of shirt sleeves.
In shirt-sleeves, the way I generally worked, I sat sketching a bar of soap taped to an upper corner of my drawing board.
1970, Jack Finney, chapter 1, in Time and Again, New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 72 more examples
A bunch of workmen were lying on the grass of the park beside Macquarie Street, in the dinner hour. It was winter, the end of May, but the sun was warm, and they lay there in shirt-sleeves, talking.
1923, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, “Torestin”, in Kangaroo, London: Martin Secker […], →OCLC, page 1As Sherma S. Vinograd points out that we move from “Arms that are braceleted and white and bare” near the table and shawl to the narrow streets inhabited by “lonely men in shirt-sleaves."^([sic])
2016, Abhijit Bagchi, The Early T. S. Eliot: An Artist in the Making, →ISBN
Cite this entry
shirt-sleeves. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/shirt-sleeves
“shirt-sleeves.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/shirt-sleeves. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “shirt-sleeves,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/shirt-sleeves.
Source: shirt-sleeves on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.