Word.ws English Dictionary

skivvies

skivvies noun: underwear, especially men's underwear and especially men's underpants. Also the plural of skivvy.

skivvies: underwear, especially men's underwear and especially men's underpants
Image: Roger Gor, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

skivvies pl (plural only)

  1. (US, colloquial, plural, plural-only) Underwear, especially men's underwear and especially men's underpants.
    • My skivvies disappeared in surgery, a sinister conjunction of circumstance.1993, William S. Burroughs, edited by Oliver Harris, The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959, New York: Penguin, →ISBN, page 149
    • Then she pulled his pants down around his knees. He had a pair of old gray-and-white tight skivvies on. They were worn and threadbare and tight around his groin.2001, Joe Meno, How the Hula Girl Sings, published 2005, page 165

Also used as

skivvies is also the plural of skivvy.

Examples of skivvies in a sentence

  • Everyone in 2nd platoon had two pairs of boots, two pairs of utilities and several pair of skivvies, which served no purpose in Nam.2002, James R. Kelly, Casting Alpha: Amtracs in Vietnam, page 86:
  • And the ceiling is so low that the man dancing on the bar, in nothing but his skivvies, was hunched over like a gorilla.2005 March 13, Denny Lee, “Looking for Mr. Right Now”, in New York Times:

Synonyms of skivvies

1 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of skivvies

Questions about skivvies

What does skivvies mean?
Skivvies means underwear, especially men's underwear and especially men's underpants.
How do you use skivvies in a sentence?
Everyone in 2nd platoon had two pairs of boots, two pairs of utilities and several pair of skivvies, which served no purpose in Nam.
What part of speech is skivvies?
Skivvies is a noun.

Words near skivvies in the dictionary

  1. skiving off
  2. skivings
  3. skivs
  4. skivvie
  5. skivvied
  6. skivvies
  7. skivvy
  8. skivvying
  9. skivy
  10. skiwampus
  11. skiway

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: skivvies (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:

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

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