shirtsleeve

shirtsleeve is the alternative form of shirt sleeve.

shirtsleeve is the alternative form of shirt-sleeve.

Meaning of shirt sleeve

shirt sleeve (plural shirt sleeves)

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...

shirt-sleeve (not comparable)

Having an informal, relaxed appearance or approach, particularly in business.
- He had a shirt-sleeve style of management.
(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...

What is shirtsleeve the alternative form of?: Shirtsleeve is the alternative form of shirt sleeve.

Adapted from Wiktionary: shirtsleeve (page history and authors); shirt sleeve (page history and authors); 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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-shirtsleeve.wav.

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