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

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 antiquark
  2. down antiquarks
  3. down at heel
  4. down at heels
  5. down at the heel
  6. down at the heels
  7. down bad
  8. down below
  9. down bow
  10. down bows
  11. down bubble

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.