boiled shirt
Americannoun
noun
Etymology
Origin of boiled shirt
An Americanism dating back to 1850–55
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
In the midst of this week's heat wave, CBS gave a Sunday broadcast of music that was as distinguished, and as warmly unseasonal, as a boiled shirt.
From Time Magazine Archive
Trickier to get on and off than an old-fashioned boiled shirt, hemmed in by a landscape as disheveled as a Congressman's collar, the trapped and trammeled Washington-Hoover Airport has since 1926 been a fliers' nightmare.
From Time Magazine Archive
Little Harry went to F. Knapp's Institute, whose headmaster still wore "the classical uniform of a German schoolmaster�a long-tailed coat of black alpaca, a boiled shirt with somewhat fringy cuffs, and a white lawn necktie."
From Time Magazine Archive
Will he turn worm and let himself be stuffed back into a boiled shirt?
From Time Magazine Archive
But if a man says, "This beautiful Sabbath morn," you know for a certainty that he wears a long-tailed black coat, a boiled shirt, and a white tie.
From Back Home by Wood, Eugene
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
