redskirt
redskirt noun: an unimportant or expendable female character, especially one introduced only to be killed in order to underscore the peril faced by important characters.
Noun
redskirt (plural redskirts)
- An unimportant or expendable female character, especially one introduced only to be killed in order to underscore the peril faced by important characters.
- Wasn't there that episode where the aliens turned everyone into little blocks of styrofoam, and one of the aliens turned a redskirt and a redshirt into cubes and crumbled one of them? And then Scotty got really drunk. I seem to recall that the redskirt bought it that time.2007 February 10, Marc Goodman, “Re: Response to Steven Pinker's 'The Mystery of Consciousness'”, in alt.religion.kibology (Usenet)
Forms of redskirt
| plural | redskirts |
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Origin of redskirt
From red + skirt. Patterned after redshirt, which derived from the tendency for male security officers, who wore red shirts, to die on episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series. Female crew members wore minidresses, but only one red-uniformed female character was killed during the series' run, in the episode "By Any Other Name."
Questions about redskirt
- What does redskirt mean?
- Redskirt means an unimportant or expendable female character, especially one introduced only to be killed in order to underscore the peril faced by important characters.
- What part of speech is redskirt?
- Redskirt is a noun.
- What is the plural of redskirt?
- The plural of redskirt is redskirts.
Words near redskirt in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: redskirt (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-redskirt.wav.
Cite this entry: “redskirt.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/redskirt. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.