Word.ws English Dictionary

down in the heel

down in the heel 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 in the heel

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

Words near down in the heel in the dictionary

  1. down for the count
  2. down home
  3. down horrendous
  4. down in flames
  5. down in the dumps
  6. down in the heel
  7. down in the heels
  8. down in the mouth
  9. down jacket
  10. down jackets
  11. down line

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: down in the heel (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 in the heel.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/down_in_the_heel. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.