short-sheet

short-sheet verb: to play a prank by folding someone's bed sheets to make the space for lying in the bed unusably short.

Verb

short-sheet (third-person singular simple present short-sheets, present participle short-sheeting, simple past and past participle short-sheeted)

(idiomatic) To play a prank by folding someone's bed sheets to make the space for lying in the bed unusably short.
- Another recreation that appealed to us boys was ‘short-sheeting’ the elderly patients’ beds.1933, Frank Clune, Try Anything Once, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 11

third-person singular present	short-sheets
present participle	short-sheeting
past participle	short-sheeted
past	short-sheeted
alternative form	short sheet

What does short-sheet mean?: Short-sheet means to play a prank by folding someone's bed sheets to make the space for lying in the bed unusably short.
What part of speech is short-sheet?: Short-sheet is a verb.
What is the past tense of short-sheet?: The past tense of short-sheet is short-sheeted.

Adapted from Wiktionary: short-sheet (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: En-au-short-sheet.ogg.

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