Word.ws English Dictionary

shirt-sleeve

shirt-sleeve adjective: having an informal, relaxed appearance or approach, particularly in business. Also the alternative form of shirt sleeve.

Adjective

shirt-sleeve (not comparable)

  1. Having an informal, relaxed appearance or approach, particularly in business.
    • He had a shirt-sleeve style of management.
  2. (space flight) That allows working without the need of wearing a spacesuit.
    • The Exploration Cooling Garment shall allow a crewmember to maintain their nominal shirt-sleeve range of motion.2008, Janet Ferl, Linda Hewes, Lindsay Aitchinson, Victor Koscheyev, Gloria Leon, Ed Hodgson, Frank Sneeringer, “Trade Study of an Exploration Cooling Garment”, in 38th International Conference on...

Also used as

shirt-sleeve is also the alternative form of shirt sleeve.

Forms of shirt-sleeve

pluralshirt-sleeves

Origin of shirt-sleeve

The adjective sense is derived from the practice of taking one’s jacket off and relaxing in shirt sleeves.

Questions about shirt-sleeve

What does shirt-sleeve mean?
Shirt-sleeve means having an informal, relaxed appearance or approach, particularly in business.
What part of speech is shirt-sleeve?
Shirt-sleeve is an adjective.

Words near shirt-sleeve in the dictionary

  1. shirt-front
  2. shirt-jac
  3. shirt-jacs
  4. shirt-lifter
  5. shirt-lifters
  6. shirt-sleeve
  7. shirt-sleeves
  8. shirt-stud abscess
  9. shirt-stud abscesses
  10. shirt-tail
  11. shirt-tails

Source and license

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