top shelf
top shelf adjective: best, or high quality.
Adjective
top shelf (not comparable)
- Best, or high quality.
- I bought a bottle of top shelf whiskey.
- Describing books, magazines, or movies that have adult content or softcore pornography.
- Most of the band used to buy Autotrader to read on the various bus and plane journeys, but Barry would always turn up with a copy of Underwear Unlimited or some other seedy little top-shelf mag.2008, Rick Wakeman, Martin Roach, Grumpy Old Rock Star, →ISBN, page 83
Noun
top shelf (plural top shelves)
- The upper part of the goal.
Synonyms of top shelf
Forms of top shelf
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| alternative form | top-shelf |
| Noun | |
| plural | top shelves |
Origin of top shelf
* (US: best, or high quality): Possibly from the higher quality, thus more expensive, thus less often used liquors being stored on the less accessible top shelf behind a wet bar. * (British: material with adult content): Such material is often stored on the top shelf in a newsagent's shop, where it is both less visible and harder to reach without being seen.
Questions about top shelf
- What does top shelf mean?
- Top shelf means best, or high quality.
- What part of speech is top shelf?
- Top shelf can be an adjective or a noun.
Words near top shelf in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: top shelf (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: En-au-top shelf.ogg.
Cite this entry: “top shelf.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/top_shelf. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.