Word.ws English Dictionary

plus fours

plus fours noun: wide knickerbocker breeches, so called because originally they were designed with four inches of excess material so as to hang in a fold below the fastening beneath the knee; traditionally associated with sports, especially golf.

Noun

plus fours pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) Wide knickerbocker breeches, so called because originally they were designed with four inches of excess material so as to hang in a fold below the fastening beneath the knee; traditionally associated with sports, especially golf.
    • And he looked quite smart in his brown plus fours. A few years ago he would not have dared to wear plus fours. They had belonged exclusively to the wealthier folk. Now everybody wore them. He was pleased with his pair. Quite cheap they had been too.2009, Alan Gould, Every Creature of God Is Good, Lulu.com
    • Other Americans went to the opposite extreme. They donned plus-fours, carried canes, and affected British accents. What were natural habits for the British became artificial mannerisms for their American emulators.2010, Thomas J. Schaeper, Kathleen Schaeper, “Yanks and Brits”, in Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, and the Creation of an American Elite, New York, NY: Berghahn Books, →ISBN, page 50

Forms of plus fours

alternative formplus-fours

Questions about plus fours

What does plus fours mean?
Plus fours means wide knickerbocker breeches, so called because originally they were designed with four inches of excess material so as to hang in a fold below the fastening beneath the knee; traditionally associated with sports, especially golf.
What part of speech is plus fours?
Plus fours is a noun.

Words near plus fours in the dictionary

  1. pluronic acid
  2. pluronics
  3. plus
  4. plus factor
  5. plus factors
  6. plus fours
  7. plus mark
  8. plus marks
  9. plus minus
  10. plus one
  11. plus ones

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: plus fours (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-plus fours.wav.

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