knee breeches
Americanplural noun
Etymology
Origin of knee breeches
First recorded in 1825–35
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.
Early on, and briefly, waiters were unfortunately tricked out in white wigs and satin knee breeches, a la Versailles-on-the-Venice-canals.
From Los Angeles Times • Aug. 8, 2025
Even the word “oratory,” from our postmillennial point of view, seems outdated, the rhetorical equivalent of knee breeches and frock coats.
From Washington Post • Jul. 8, 2021
He was the last president to wear the powdered wig and knee breeches of an eighteenth-century gentleman and nearly the last Revolutionary in high office.
From Textbooks • Jan. 18, 2018
After becoming Speaker in 2009, he updated his own attire by wearing a business suit, rather than the knee breeches and tights worn by his predecessors.
From BBC • Feb. 7, 2017
Every morning there came an old man to clean the rooms and to wait upon him, otherwise the old man in the knee breeches would have been quite alone in the house.
From Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales First Series by Andersen, H. C. (Hans Christian)
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.
