Word.ws English Dictionary

pantywaist

pantywaist adjective: weak, timid, effeminate, ineffectual.

Adjective

pantywaist (not comparable)

  1. (especially, informal) Weak, timid, effeminate, ineffectual.
    • His rough, burly father was mortified by the lad's pantywaist behavior.

Noun

pantywaist (plural pantywaists)

  1. (dated, informal) An undergarment composed, in part, of panties attached to a waistband.
    • Lace trimmed panty waists—50 cents.1929 April 29, “The Altman Sale of Children's Underwear”, in The New York Times, display advertisement, page 16
  2. (derogatory, informal) An ineffectual, weak, or timid person, especially a boy or young man; a sissy.
    • Don't be misled by the British tendency to be soft-spoken and polite. The English language didn't spread across the oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps because these people were pantywaists.1943 January 24, Hal Borland, “'Baedekers' for Our Fighters: So you're going abroad, says Uncle Sam”, in The New York Times, page SM14
    • She stared at the metal bars hanging from the wood beams of the ceiling. Lined handcuffs dangled from the ends. The dungeon master would suspend his handcuffed victim from that horizontal bar. “Don’t be a pantywaist, baby. This is what you wanted.”2010, Jasmine Haynes, “Surrender to Me”, in Hers for the Evening, New York, N.Y.: Heat/Berkley Publishing Group, →ISBN, page 271

Synonyms of pantywaist

Forms of pantywaist

pluralpantywaists

Words formed from pantywaist

Questions about pantywaist

What does pantywaist mean?
Pantywaist means weak, timid, effeminate, ineffectual.
What part of speech is pantywaist?
Pantywaist can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near pantywaist in the dictionary

  1. pantyliners
  2. pantylines
  3. Pantymwyn
  4. pantyshot
  5. pantyshots
  6. pantywaist
  7. pantywaisted
  8. pantywaists
  9. Pantón
  10. Panuara
  11. Panubigan

Source and license

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

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