hot pants

hot pants noun: very brief, tight shorts mainly worn by women and girls.

Image: Andrey from Moscow, Russia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun (1)

hot pants pl (plural only)

(plural, plural-only) Very brief, tight shorts mainly worn by women and girls.
- Her hot pants were so short, I could see her butt cheeks.
Synonyms:

booty shorts
(plural, plural-only, slang) A lustful attraction toward somebody.
- And if any fat little old lady with gray hair could have hot pants, she's got hot pants for you.2014, Stanley Ellin, The Dark Fantastic

hot pants (plural hot pants)

(archaic) Someone (especially a woman) with a high sexual appetite.
- ‘That goddamned little hot pants!’ he shouted.1939, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, Penguin, published 2011, page 89
- “I don’t wish to hurt your feelings, but KC has always been something of a hot pants.”
  “Damn,” I said, “I thought maybe you had told her what a Roscoe I was in bed.”2012, Robert B. Parker, Hush Money, page 112

plural	hot pants

From the 1970s.

What does hot pants mean?: Hot pants means very brief, tight shorts mainly worn by women and girls.
What part of speech is hot pants?: Hot pants is a noun.
What is the plural of hot pants?: The plural of hot pants is hot pants.

Adapted from Wiktionary: hot pants (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

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-hot pants.wav.

Cite this entry: “hot pants.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hot_pants. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.