waistcoat

/ˈweɪs(t)kəʊt/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,652 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: waistcoats

A waistcoat is a sleeveless buttoned top worn under a jacket. A three-piece suit with waistcoat, unbutton the waistcoat, a tweed waistcoat.

The convention is to leave the bottom button undone, which is said to date from a king who was too stout to fasten his. It is the American vest, and vest in Britain means an undershirt, which causes constant confusion between the two countries.

Definitions of waistcoat

1nounwaistcoatA sleeveless buttoned top worn under a jacket.B2+
“For the wedding, he wore a grey suit with a matching waistcoat.”

waistcoat is a garment.

Where it comes from

Waist plus coat, from the seventeenth century, when the garment reached only to the waist.

From waist + coat. Compare yol wauscoat, wazcoote.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Clothes & Fashion

Practise this word

waistcoat in the wild

Any given waistcoat can be simple or ornate, or for leisure or luxury.
Waistcoat
Historically, the waistcoat can be worn either in the place of, or underneath, a larger coat, dependent upon the weather, wearer, and setting.
Waistcoat
In men's fashion, the three-piece ditto suit of sack coat, waistcoat, and trousers in the same fabric emerged as a novelty.
1860s in Western fashion
For men, it comprised a matching tailcoat and waistcoat, breeches and stockings, lace cuffs and cravat, together with a cocked hat and a sword.
Court uniform and dress in the United Kingdom
A "surtout" was a 17th-century term used to describe a coat worn over another coat, like a waistcoat.
Surtout

1 / 2

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.

← Vocabulary