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shorts

UK/ʃɔː(ɹ)ts/
nounA2Common in everyday speech and writing · #2,580 of 15,258neutral

Shorts are summer legwear that stops above the knees. A pair of shorts, wear shorts, running shorts.

The word is always plural, like trousers and jeans, and you count them in pairs — a habit left over from when leg coverings really were two separate garments. In American English shorts can also mean underwear. Note that short and long trousers were once a mark of a boy's age.

David Ring · CC0

Definitions of shorts

  1. 1nounshortsLegwear that stops above the knees.A2

    “It was so hot that everyone was wearing shorts and T-shirts.”

shorts is clothing.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *(s)ker-

  2. Middle English

    schort

  3. English

    short

  4. English, today

    shorts

Built from

  • sċort · Old English — short

From short + -s. short comes from Middle English schort. From Middle English schort, short, from Old English sċeort, sċort (“short”), from Proto-West Germanic skurt, from Proto-Germanic skurtaz (“short”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)ker-. a doublet of shirt and skirt and curt. 2

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Clothes & Fashion

Practise this word

shorts in the wild

  • Film actor Joe Palma stood in (shot from behind to obscure his face) to complete four Shemp-era shorts under contract.

    The Three Stooges

  • Columbia contract player Joe Besser joined as the third Stooge for two years, departing in 1958 to nurse his ill wife after Columbia terminated its shorts division.

    The Three Stooges

  • After Bugs Bunny became popular in the Merrie Melodies shorts of the early 1940s, Looney Tunes moved from black-and-white to color production between 1942 and 1943.

    Looney Tunes

  • From the beginning to the present day, 1,041 theatrical shorts have been created.

    Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies filmography

  • There are a variety of shorts, ranging from knee-length short trousers that can in some situations be worn as formal clothes to beachwear and athletic shorts.

    Shorts

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the sċort family

short

shorts — used about once every 357 pages · #2,580 · point at the bar for the others

  • shorten
  • shortly
  • shortness
  • bib shorts