Word.ws English Dictionary

shirts and skins

shirts and skins noun: a method of indicating team membership, typically when played by boys or men in informal sporting contests, in which the members of one team (the "skins") remove their shirts and play shirtless, while the others (the "shirts") leave their shirts on.

shirts and skins: a method of indicating team membership, typically when played by boys or men in informal sporting...
Image: Cliff, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

shirts and skins pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) A method of indicating team membership, typically when played by boys or men in informal sporting contests, in which the members of one team (the "skins") remove their shirts and play shirtless, while the others (the "shirts") leave their shirts on.
  2. (plural, plural-only) Any game (especially basketball) played using the above method.

Questions about shirts and skins

What does shirts and skins mean?
Shirts and skins means a method of indicating team membership, typically when played by boys or men in informal sporting contests, in which the members of one team (the "skins") remove their shirts and play shirtless, while the others (the "shirts") leave their shirts on.
What part of speech is shirts and skins?
Shirts and skins is a noun.

Words near shirts and skins in the dictionary

  1. shirtlike
  2. shirtmaker
  3. shirtmakers
  4. shirtmaking
  5. shirts
  6. shirts and skins
  7. shirtseller
  8. shirtsellers
  9. shirtsful
  10. shirtsleeve
  11. shirtsleeved

Source and license

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