Word.ws English Dictionary

shavetail

shavetail noun: an inexperienced person, especially a newly-commissioned military officer.

Noun

shavetail (plural shavetails)

  1. (US) An inexperienced person, especially a newly-commissioned military officer.
    • Yass. I never got above the rank of shavetail. We were the dogfaces who gave ’em hell at Chateau Thierry.1962, Joseph Commings, “The X Street Murders”, in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries, published 2006
    • You stupid, goddamn shavetail son of a bitch! You keep your fucking weapon pointed downrange or I will shove that fuckin' piece up your sorry fucking ass!2010, Laurence Andries, Bruce C. McKenna, The Pacific (miniseries), episode 5, spoken by Elmo M. Haney (Gary Sweet)

Forms of shavetail

pluralshavetails

Origin of shavetail

From shave + tail.

Questions about shavetail

What does shavetail mean?
Shavetail means an inexperienced person, especially a newly-commissioned military officer.
What part of speech is shavetail?
Shavetail is a noun.
What is the plural of shavetail?
The plural of shavetail is shavetails.

Words near shavetail in the dictionary

  1. Shaver Lake
  2. shavers
  3. shaves
  4. shaves up
  5. shavest
  6. shavetail
  7. shavetails
  8. shaveth
  9. Shavian
  10. Shavian alphabet
  11. Shaviana

Source and license

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