Word.ws English Dictionary

cross-dressed

cross-dressed is the simple past and past participle of cross-dress.

Meaning of cross-dress

Verb

cross-dress (third-person singular simple present cross-dresses, present participle cross-dressing, simple past and past participle cross-dressed)

  1. To wear clothes typically associated with the opposite sex.
    • The need to cross-dress is no more understood than the natural forms of differing sexual orientation.1976 December 11, Sarah Montgomery, “Plea For Tolerance”, in Gay Community News, volume 4, number 24, page 4
  2. To display (on the surface of a dendritic cell) antigens produced by a different cell.
    • Such DC are cross-dressed because they are wearing peptide-MHC complexes generated by other cells.2006 November 1, Brian P. Dolan et al., “Dendritic Cells Cross-Dressed with Peptide MHC Class I Complexes Prime CD8+ T Cells”, in Journal of Immunology, volume 177, number 9, →DOI, pages 6018–6024

Questions about cross-dressed

What is cross-dressed the simple past and past participle of?
Cross-dressed is the simple past and past participle of cross-dress.

Words near cross-dressed in the dictionary

  1. cross-disciplinary
  2. cross-division
  3. cross-divisions
  4. cross-docking
  5. cross-dress
  6. cross-dressed
  7. cross-dresser
  8. cross-dressers
  9. cross-dresses
  10. cross-dressing
  11. cross-exam

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cross-dressed (page history and authors); cross-dress (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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Cite this entry: “cross-dressed.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cross-dressed. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.