Word.ws English Dictionary

shirt sleeve

shirt sleeve noun: the part of a shirt that covers an arm.

Noun

shirt sleeve (plural shirt sleeves)

  1. The part of a shirt that covers an arm.
    • But Dick's necessity of behaving as he did was a projection of some submerged reality: he was compelled to walk there, or stand there, his shirt-sleeve fitting his wrist and his coat sleeve encasing his shirt-sleeve like a sleeve valve, his collar moulded plastically to his neck, his red hair cut...1934, F[rancis] Scott Fitzgerald, chapter VIII, in Malcolm Cowley, editor, Tender is the Night […], New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, published 1951, →OCLC, book III (Casualties: 1925), page...
    • By far the most important fitting issue for sleeves, whether for a woman's shirt or a man's, is length, and that's probably the only part of the shirt sleeve that's bothered you if it wasn't right.1998, David Page Coffin, Shirtmaking: Developing Skills for Fine Sewing, →ISBN, page 51

Examples of shirt sleeve in a sentence

  • There are certain types of sleeving that are difficult to perform with the shirt sleeves down, and it is difficult and risky to attempt sleeving while wearing a shirt with "French" cuffs.2006, J. B. Bobo, Modern Coin Magic, →ISBN, page 99:
  • He used to bowl slow left arm, round the wicket, and he always had his shirt sleeves loose – flapping all over the place.2012, Cecil Johnson, It Just Isn’t Cricket, →ISBN, page 33:

Forms of shirt sleeve

pluralshirt sleeves
alternative formshirtsleeve
alternative formshirt-sleeve

Questions about shirt sleeve

What does shirt sleeve mean?
Shirt sleeve means the part of a shirt that covers an arm.
How do you use shirt sleeve in a sentence?
There are certain types of sleeving that are difficult to perform with the shirt sleeves down, and it is difficult and risky to attempt sleeving while wearing a shirt with "French" cuffs.
What part of speech is shirt sleeve?
Shirt sleeve is a noun.
What is the plural of shirt sleeve?
The plural of shirt sleeve is shirt sleeves.

Words near shirt sleeve in the dictionary

  1. shirt
  2. shirt collar
  3. shirt collars
  4. shirt lifter
  5. shirt lifters
  6. shirt sleeve
  7. shirt sleeves
  8. shirt waist
  9. shirt waists
  10. shirt-button
  11. shirt-buttons

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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “shirt sleeve.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shirt_sleeve. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.