Word.ws English Dictionary

button-down

button-down adjective: of a collar, able to be buttoned down to the shirt, as over a necktie.

button-down: of a collar, able to be buttoned down to the shirt, as over a necktie
Image: ArnoldReinhold, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Adjective

button-down

  1. Of a collar, able to be buttoned down to the shirt, as over a necktie.
  2. (idiomatic) Serious; staid; businesslike.
  3. (idiomatic) Conservative; conventional; unimaginative.

Noun

button-down (plural button-downs)

  1. A shirt with a button-down collar.
    • Wearing a stylish pink button-down with white pinstripes, Ozzie Guillen beamed about feeling like he had "come home" when he was presented Wednesday as the manager of the Miami Marlins.2011, Dan McNeil, “Doesn't take long for Guillen to be irrelevant in Chicago”, in Chicago Tribune
  2. (colloquial) A button-up shirt.

Forms of button-down

Adjective
alternative formbuttoned-down
Noun
pluralbutton-downs

Questions about button-down

What does button-down mean?
Button-down means of a collar, able to be buttoned down to the shirt, as over a necktie.
What part of speech is button-down?
Button-down can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near button-down in the dictionary

  1. button willow
  2. button wrinklewort
  3. button wrinkleworts
  4. button-basher
  5. button-bashers
  6. button-down
  7. button-downs
  8. button-fish
  9. button-fishes
  10. button-hole
  11. button-holes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: button-down (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-button-down.ogg.

Cite this entry: “button-down.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/button-down. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.