Word.ws English Dictionary

Orange Shirt Day

Orange Shirt Day proper noun: september 30th; A national observance in remembrance of the time of year that Indigenous children were forcibly removed from Native homes to be forced into schools to assimilate into the colonizer's culture and lose their birth culture; and the cultural genocide and deaths of children at the schools, caused by the residential school system. Observers frequently wear orange shirts to stand in solidarity with survivors of the residential schools. First observed in 2013.

Proper noun

Orange Shirt Day (plural Orange Shirt Days)

  1. (Canada, memorials) September 30th; A national observance in remembrance of the time of year that Indigenous children were forcibly removed from Native homes to be forced into schools to assimilate into the colonizer's culture and lose their birth culture; and the cultural genocide and deaths of children at the schools, caused by the residential school system. Observers frequently wear orange shirts to stand in solidarity with survivors of the residential schools. First observed in 2013.

Forms of Orange Shirt Day

pluralOrange Shirt Days

Origin of Orange Shirt Day

From orange + shirt + day. From the colour of the shirt worn by a survivor of the residential school system, which was forcibly removed by Christian missionaries, who desired to assimilate indigenous children forcibly enrolled at the schools.

Questions about Orange Shirt Day

What does Orange Shirt Day mean?
Orange Shirt Day means september 30th; A national observance in remembrance of the time of year that Indigenous children were forcibly removed from Native homes to be forced into schools to assimilate into the colonizer's culture and lose their birth culture; and the cultural genocide and deaths of children at the schools, caused by the residential school system. Observers frequently wear orange shirts to stand in solidarity with survivors of the residential schools. First observed in 2013.
What part of speech is Orange Shirt Day?
Orange Shirt Day is a proper noun.

Words near Orange Shirt Day in the dictionary

  1. Orange River Colony
  2. orange roughies
  3. orange roughy
  4. orange sharpshooter
  5. orange sharpshooters
  6. Orange Shirt Day
  7. orange site
  8. orange squash
  9. orange squashes
  10. orange staff sergeant
  11. orange staff sergeants

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Orange Shirt Day (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:

Cite this entry: “Orange Shirt Day.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/orange_shirt_day. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.