Word.ws English Dictionary

pocket protector

pocket protector noun: a sheath, usually of plastic, designed to fit in a shirt pocket and hold pens and other small implements, preventing them from tearing or staining the shirt.

Noun

pocket protector (plural pocket protectors)

  1. A sheath, usually of plastic, designed to fit in a shirt pocket and hold pens and other small implements, preventing them from tearing or staining the shirt.
    • Common numbers like distances would never be expressed in megameters or nanomiles — it would bring us too close to the Dilbertian world of pocket protectors and calculator holsters.2009, J. Scott Turner, The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures, page 15
  2. (US, metonymically, slang) A white-collar technical worker such as a scientist or engineer, especially in military and space applications; a nerd or someone with a nerdy job.
    • It was a pocket-protector paradise, its culture defined by the HP way: paternal, collaborative, entrepreneurial, community minded and inconspicuous.2005, Time
    • My dad is head of the math department at UCLA. Yes, that is where all the pocket protectors go to meet other pocket protectors.2012, Annabel Monaghan, A Girl Named Digit, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, →ISBN, page 5

Forms of pocket protector

pluralpocket protectors

Questions about pocket protector

What does pocket protector mean?
Pocket protector means a sheath, usually of plastic, designed to fit in a shirt pocket and hold pens and other small implements, preventing them from tearing or staining the shirt.
What part of speech is pocket protector?
Pocket protector is a noun.
What is the plural of pocket protector?
The plural of pocket protector is pocket protectors.

Words near pocket protector in the dictionary

  1. pocket pistol
  2. pocket pistols
  3. pocket plum
  4. pocket plums
  5. pocket pool
  6. pocket protector
  7. pocket protectors
  8. pocket pussies
  9. pocket pussy
  10. pocket rocket
  11. pocket rockets

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pocket protector (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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Cite this entry: “pocket protector.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pocket_protector. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.