Word.ws English Dictionary

all fur coat and no knickers

all fur coat and no knickers adjective: having a superficially positive appearance that is belied by the reality, e.g., superficially elegant and beautiful but actually common.

Adjective

all fur coat and no knickers (not comparable)

  1. (UK, derogatory, idiomatic) Having a superficially positive appearance that is belied by the reality, e.g., superficially elegant and beautiful but actually common.
    • A nurse spoke for a number of her colleagues when she said that she felt that these developments were a waste of time and 'all fur coat and no knickers' (personal interview, 1994).1999, David Brock, Michael J. Powell, Christopher Robin Hinings, Restructuring the professional organization: Accounting, Health Care and Law
    • From this viewpoint some forms of Post-Modernism mean new façades for old concepts, dressing the skyscraper, or the vast supermarket in the garb of the tart - 'all fur coat and no knickers'.2003, Cliff Moughtin, Urban Design: Street and Square

Synonyms of all fur coat and no knickers

Questions about all fur coat and no knickers

What does all fur coat and no knickers mean?
All fur coat and no knickers means having a superficially positive appearance that is belied by the reality, e.g., superficially elegant and beautiful but actually common.
What part of speech is all fur coat and no knickers?
All fur coat and no knickers is an adjective.

Words near all fur coat and no knickers in the dictionary

  1. all for
  2. all for nought
  3. all found
  4. all fours
  5. all fur and no knickers
  6. all fur coat and no knickers
  7. all garnish and no meat
  8. all gone
  9. all good
  10. all good in the hood
  11. all good things

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: all fur coat and no knickers (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-all fur coat and no knickers.ogg.

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