Word.ws English Dictionary

order of the boot

order of the boot proper noun: dismissal.

Proper noun

the order of the boot

  1. (humorous, informal) Dismissal.
    • I have been talking to Pasley . . . He was at the same school with Alec Waugh and confirms the story of his getting the order of the boot.1919, C.S. Lewis, Letter to Arthur Greeves, 16 February 1919 in Collected Letters, Vol. I, page 435
    • The Hon. Mr. SULLIVAN said, what did J. A. Lee get? He got the “order of the boot", as also did Mr. Barnard, because he would not agree with some of the doings of the Labour party.1953, New Zealand. Parliament, Parliamentary Debates, volume 298, page 964

Origin of order of the boot

An allusion to orders such as the Order of the Garter, and the phrase get the boot.

Questions about order of the boot

What does order of the boot mean?
Order of the boot means dismissal.
What part of speech is order of the boot?
Order of the boot is a proper noun.

Words near order of the boot in the dictionary

  1. order of operations
  2. order of precedence
  3. order of service
  4. order of succession
  5. order of symmetry
  6. order of the boot
  7. order of the day
  8. Order of the Garter
  9. order out
  10. order paper
  11. order papers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: order of the boot (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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