Word.ws English Dictionary

coattail

coattail noun: the flap at the back of a coat that hangs down, sometimes below the waist.

coattail: the flap at the back of a coat that hangs down, sometimes below the waist
Image: API data Catalogue record Photo, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

coattail (plural coattails)

  1. The flap at the back of a coat that hangs down, sometimes below the waist.
    • At twilight in the summer[…]the mice come out. They[…]eat the luncheon crumbs. Mr. Checkly, for instance, always brought his dinner in a paper parcel in his coat-tail pocket, and ate it when so disposed, sprinkling crumbs lavishly[…]on the floor.1892, Walter Besant, chapter II, in The Ivory Gate […], New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC
  2. (figuratively, plural-normally) Success of a figure, organization or movement that transfers to those who associate with it.
    • to ride the coattails
    • Mr Obama’s coat-tails may help lift Wall-Street-basher Elizabeth Warren past pickup-driving Everyman and one-time nude pin-up Scott Brown in Massachusetts[…].2012 October 6, “The Senate: Not so flippable”, in The Economist, archived from the original on 08 Mar 2023

Verb

coattail (third-person singular simple present coattails, present participle coattailing, simple past and past participle coattailed)

  1. (ambitransitive) To ride the coattails of.
    • It wasn't like I just coattailed the auditor's work. Based on the names on the time cards, I was able to conduct interviews with the employees whose labor was mischarged, and they told me which contracts they had actually worked on.2014, Charles E. Piper, Investigator and Fraud Fighter Guidebook: Operation War Stories, page 139
    • The first of these is what Holt calls coat-tailing on cultural epicenters. Through coat-tailing, the brand becomes part of a social movement or emergent meaning-making sub-culture such that it stands as a vested community member […]2018, Curtis P. Haugtvedt, Paul M. Herr, Frank R. Kardes, Handbook of Consumer Psychology

Forms of coattail

Noun
pluralcoattails
alternative formcoat-tail
Verb
third-person singular presentcoattails
present participlecoattailing
past participlecoattailed
pastcoattailed

Origin of coattail

From coat + tail.

Phrases with coattail

Questions about coattail

What does coattail mean?
Coattail means the flap at the back of a coat that hangs down, sometimes below the waist.
What part of speech is coattail?
Coattail can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of coattail?
The plural of coattail is coattails.

Words near coattail in the dictionary

  1. coats up
  2. Coatses
  3. coatsful
  4. coatstand
  5. coatstands
  6. coattail
  7. coattail effect
  8. coattail effects
  9. coattailed
  10. coattailing
  11. coattails

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: coattail (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-coattail.wav.

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