Shirt
nounA garment worn on the upper body, typically with a collar, sleeves, and buttons down the front.
How to spell shirt
5 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce shirt
What does shirt mean?
- nounA garment worn on the upper body, typically with a collar, sleeves, and buttons down the front.
Shirt in a sentence
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He ironed a clean shirt for the interview.
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A coffee stain spread across the front of her white shirt.
Where does shirt come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Shirt comes from the Old English scyrte, a word for a short garment, and it shares its deep root with 'short' and with the Old Norse skyrta, which gave English the word 'skirt'. The underlying Germanic sense was something cut short, since early shirts were short undergarments worn next to the skin. Over the centuries the meaning settled onto the upper-body garment with sleeves and a collar that we know today, while the closely related 'skirt' drifted to mean a garment for the lower body. The 'sh' spelling reflects the Old English pronunciation, whereas the Norse cousin kept the harder 'sk' sound, which is why shirt and skirt look and sound like the relatives they truly are. The word has been part of everyday English for well over a thousand years.
How the word is built
- shirt (single root from Old English scyrte: a short garment)
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