Dolly Varden

Dolly Varden noun: a woman's outfit, briefly fashionable in Britain and America in the late nineteenth century, with a brightly patterned, usually flowered, dress with a polonaise overskirt gathered up and draped over a separate underskirt. Also the ellipsis of Dolly Varden crab.

Image: Currier & Ives, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

Dolly Varden (plural Dolly Vardens)

A woman's outfit, briefly fashionable in Britain and America in the late nineteenth century, with a brightly patterned, usually flowered, dress with a polonaise overskirt gathered up and draped over a separate underskirt.
A large hat, one side bent downwards, abundantly trimmed with flowers.

Also used as

Dolly Varden is also the ellipsis of Dolly Varden crab.

Dolly Varden is also the ellipsis of Dolly Varden trout.

Forms of Dolly Varden

plural	Dolly Vardens

Origin of Dolly Varden

After a lively, coquettish character in Charles Dickens' novel Barnaby Rudge.

Words formed from Dolly Varden

Questions about Dolly Varden

What does Dolly Varden mean?: Dolly Varden means a woman's outfit, briefly fashionable in Britain and America in the late nineteenth century, with a brightly patterned, usually flowered, dress with a polonaise overskirt gathered up and draped over a separate underskirt.
What part of speech is Dolly Varden?: Dolly Varden is a noun.
What is the plural of Dolly Varden?: The plural of Dolly Varden is Dolly Vardens.

Words near Dolly Varden in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: Dolly Varden (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: 2026-09-02

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