Word.ws English Dictionary

shoot one's cuffs

/ʃuːt wʌnz kʌfs/

shoot one's cuffs verb: to straighten one's arms with a sudden movement to make the cuffs of one's shirt appear beyond the sleeves of one's coat or jacket.

Verb

shoot one's cuffs (third-person singular simple present shoots one's cuffs, present participle shooting one's cuffs, simple past and past participle shot one's cuffs)

  1. To straighten one's arms with a sudden movement to make the cuffs of one's shirt appear beyond the sleeves of one's coat or jacket.
    • Take a pretty young man from behind the desk or the counter. He must be possessed of consummate vanity. Teach him to shoot his cuffs, square his elbows, and brandish his pocket handkerchief.1875 July 3, “The Capitol’s Critic’s Cookery Book”, in The Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic News: A High-class Weekly Journal of Sports, Art, Literature, Music, and the Drama; Containing Numerous...
    • The room filled with hesitancy as with a fog. People cleared their throats, tried to choke down yawns. The men shot their cuffs and the women stuck their combs more firmly into their back hair.1920, Sinclair Lewis, chapter IV, in Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, →OCLC, section IV, page 52

Forms of shoot one's cuffs

third-person singular presentshoots one's cuffs
present participleshooting one's cuffs
past participleshot one's cuffs
pastshot one's cuffs

Questions about shoot one's cuffs

What does shoot one's cuffs mean?
Shoot one's cuffs means to straighten one's arms with a sudden movement to make the cuffs of one's shirt appear beyond the sleeves of one's coat or jacket.
What part of speech is shoot one's cuffs?
Shoot one's cuffs is a verb.
How do you pronounce shoot one's cuffs?
Shoot one's cuffs is pronounced /ʃuːt wʌnz kʌfs/ (UK).
What is the past tense of shoot one's cuffs?
The past tense of shoot one's cuffs is shot one's cuffs.

Words near shoot one's cuffs in the dictionary

  1. shoot off
  2. shoot off at the mouth
  3. shoot off one's mouth
  4. shoot one in the sink
  5. shoot one's bolt
  6. shoot one's cuffs
  7. shoot one's load
  8. shoot one's mouth off
  9. shoot one's shot
  10. shoot one's wad
  11. shoot oneself in the foot

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shoot one's cuffs (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-shoot one's cuffs.wav.

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