Word.ws English Dictionary

down-at-the-heels

down-at-the-heels is the alternative form of down at heel.

Meaning of down at heel

Adjective

down at heel (comparative more down at heel, superlative most down at heel)

  1. (literally) In poor condition, especially due to having worn heels; worn-out, shabby.
    • A pair of Oxford-mixture trousers […] fell in a series of not the most graceful folds over a pair of shoes sufficiently down at heel to display a pair of very soiled white stockings.1836 March – 1837 October, Charles Dickens, chapter 41, in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1837, →OCLC
  2. (broadly, idiomatic) Shabbily dressed, slovenly; impoverished; shabby, dilapidated.
    • He was a queer shoot, again, in his unkempt longish hair and slovenly clothes, a sort of very vulgar down-at-heel American in appearance.1916, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, “John”, in Twilight in Italy, London: Duckworth and Co. […], →OCLC, pages 211–212
    Antonyms:
    well-heeled

Forms of down-at-the-heels

alternative formdown-at-the-heel

Questions about down-at-the-heels

What is down-at-the-heels the alternative form of?
Down-at-the-heels is the alternative form of down at heel.

Words near down-at-the-heels in the dictionary

  1. down-and-outer
  2. down-and-outers
  3. down-and-outs
  4. down-at-heel
  5. down-at-the-heel
  6. down-at-the-heels
  7. down-ballot
  8. down-bow
  9. down-bows
  10. down-calver
  11. down-calvers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: down-at-the-heels (page history and authors); down at heel (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: “down-at-the-heels.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/down-at-the-heels. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.