Word.ws English Dictionary

reach-me-down

reach-me-down adjective: ready-made.

Adjective

reach-me-down (not comparable)

  1. Ready-made.
    • A reach-me-down dress, a penny sparkler, a fancy cake, a sixpenny entertainment . . . how can such things use up so much money?2002, Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, Canongate Books (2010), page 25

Noun

reach-me-down (plural reach-me-downs)

  1. (in plural) Ready-made clothing.
    • He shrank from the prospect of being confronted next day, at the height of his misery, with these appalling reach-me-downs.1921, P. G. Wodehouse, chapter XV, in Indiscretions of Archie

Forms of reach-me-down

pluralreach-me-downs

Origin of reach-me-down

An allusion to clothes being simply taken down from a rack, rather than tailored. See reach down.

Questions about reach-me-down

What does reach-me-down mean?
Reach-me-down means ready-made.
What part of speech is reach-me-down?
Reach-me-down can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near reach-me-down in the dictionary

  1. reach stacker
  2. reach stackers
  3. reach'd
  4. reach-around
  5. reach-arounds
  6. reach-me-down
  7. reach-me-downs
  8. reach-through
  9. reachabilities
  10. reachability
  11. reachable

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: reach-me-down (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: “reach-me-down.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/reach-me-down. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.