Other forms: shirts
A shirt is a garment for the upper body with a collar, buttons down the front and sleeves. A white shirt, a shirt and tie, roll your sleeves up.
In British English the word means specifically that formal or semi-formal garment, and a T-shirt, a polo shirt and a sweatshirt are named separately. American English uses shirt more loosely for almost any top. In sport a shirt is the team strip, and shirt number is the number on the back. Note the idioms, which are all about money or temper: lose your shirt, keep your shirt on, and the shirt off his back, meaning extreme generosity.
1nounshirtA garment for the upper body with a collar and buttons.
“He ironed a shirt for the interview.”
2nountopThe top worn by a sports team.
“The away shirt is yellow this year.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
shirt is a garment.
Old English scyrte and Old Norse skyrta are the same word, and so is skirt, which English borrowed from the Norse side. One garment split into two: the Germanic short thing that went on top became the shirt, and the borrowed form became the skirt. Both come from a root meaning cut short.
Middle English
schirte
English, today
shirt
Built from
From Middle English schirte. From Middle English schirt, schirte, schuirte, schyrtte, seorte, shearte, shert, shirt, sseorte, from Old English sċyrte (“a short garment; skirt; kirtle”), from Proto-West Germanic skurtijā, from Proto-Germanic skurtijǭ (“a short garment, skirt, apron”), from skurtaz (“short”), from skertaną (“to cut off”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)ker- (“to cut off; to divide”). a doublet of skirt. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA