old shoe

American  

noun

Informal.

1. a person or thing that is comfortably familiar and unpretentious.

   Uncle Will is a lovable old shoe.

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old shoe Idioms  

1. see comfortable as an old shoe.

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Other Word Forms

• old-shoe adjective

Example Sentences

My knife also became something of a conversation piece—friends I cooked for wanted to try it, drawing it from its homemade cover, crafted from old shoe boxes.

From The Wall Street Journal

It was a grind that gave way to a routine as comfortable as an old shoe.

From Los Angeles Times

“These new projects are welcome, but workers can’t be discarded like an old shoe.”

From Seattle Times

“It was like putting on an old shoe, a shoe so old the laces were gone,” Burrows jokes.

From Seattle Times

Of Carver, Colescott observed in 1990, “Subversion of this icon, a quasi-religious image that everyone bows to and believes in — but nobody thinks about — seemed like a good idea, a new life for an old shoe.”

From New York Times