Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A garment formerly worn by men under a doublet.
- n. Chiefly British A short, sleeveless, collarless garment worn especially over a shirt and often under a suit jacket; a vest.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A name of various garments. A body-garment for men, formerly worn under the doublet, and apparently intended to show through its slashes, or where it was left unbuttoned.
- n. A garment without sleeves worn under a coat. They were formerly long, reaching sometimes to the thighs, and were made of rich and bright-colored material; now they are worn much shorter. They are generally single-breasted, but double-breasted waistcoats have been in fashion at different times.
- n. A garment worn by women in imitation of a man's waistcoat. Compare .
Wiktionary
- n. A sleeveless, collarless garment worn over a shirt and under a suit jacket."waistcoat." Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 09 Apr. 2007. ."waistcoat." Merriam-Webster Online. Merriam-Webster, Inc. 09 Apr. 2007. .
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A short, sleeveless coat or garment for men, worn under the coat, extending no lower than the hips, and covering the waist; a vest.
- n. A garment occasionally worn by women as a part of fashionable costume.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a man's sleeveless garment worn underneath a coat
Examples
“The waistcoat is important, see, because the colors denote certain ranks.”
“He had a tuft of white hair at the back of his dark head, like the cotton-tail of a rabbit, and as well as corduroy breeches he wore a rabbit-skin waistcoat, and he was a great nuisance to gamekeepers, who called him a poacher; whereas all he did was to let the rabbits out of the snares when it was kind to, and destroy the snares.”
“And this was the first and last time we ever saw Jack London arrayed in waistcoat and starched collar.”
“His eye is large and dark and dewy; he wears a tight little red satin waistcoat on his full”
“In less than two weeks he revealed a tight, glossy little bright red satin waistcoat and with it a certain youthful maturity such as one beholds in the wearer of a first dress suit.”
“That's because the company's Travel Vest - North American for 'waistcoat' - is "compatible with iPad", meaning it has an inner pocket large enough to accommodate Apple's 243 x 190 x”
“Marianne’s marriage to the man in the flannel waistcoat is dissatisfying because it undoes the reader’s nostalgia for uncomplicated sentimental resolution.”
Money, Matrimony, and Memory: Secondary Heroines in Radcliffe, Austen, and Cooper
“Not every man can wear a vest what the Brits call a waistcoat without looking like a riverboat gambler or John Foster Dulles.”
The Huffington Post: Roger Stone: StoneZone's 2011 Best and Worst Dressed
“His waistcoat is the most hideous shade of puce I have ever seen.”
“Others might see glory only through hexameters and pentameters; renown might await others only through boating or cricket; with him the colour of his coat and the cut of his waistcoat were the materials of fame.”
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘waistcoat’.
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UK Usage - Find US Equivalent
All these terms have a (different) American English equivalent. Wonder if you can identify them?
abridgement (abri..., accoutrement, accoutre, acknowledgement (..., opposite, advert, adaptor, adapter, sticking plaster, advertise, adviser (advisor ..., adze, aesthete and 1196 more...
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•Unexpected Pronunciation, Now! with Public Acc...
Inspired to publicity by the conversation at segway. Thanks, pals!
boatswain, clapboard, waistcoat, victuals, forecastle, solder, colonel, ensign, worcestershire sauce, creatinine, coelacanth, banal and 77 more...
chained_bear Frindley: If I had to guess, I'd say vests are much shorter/modern-looking. But that is by no means a technical (or even correct) answer. Aug 27, 2008
frindley Then there's the matter of what's a waistcoat and what's a vest. Aug 27, 2008
qroqqa Ugh! I don't want to go back to SAMPA /"weIsk@Ut/, but the limited HTML here offers no control over fonts. I see the IPA characters in a completely different font: Lucida Sans Unicode, I believe, an ugly one I try to avoid when I have CSS or HTML control over it. So, as with IPA generally, it's just blind luck if any one viewer's browser supports it. Aug 27, 2008
chained_bear I just meant here, where I work, it's generally pronounced "weskit," but spelled "waistcoat."
(Edit: a minor note, I can't actually see most of the pronunciation characters in your comment, except for the schwa. FYI) Aug 26, 2008
qroqqa Certainly in standard British speech, the spelling pronunciation /ˈweɪsˌkəʊt/ outnumbers the older /ˈweskət/, if that was ever standard. (The OED, with W not recently revised, calls the latter 'colloq. or vulgar', and though it notes the spelling 'weskit', gives no examples.) However, I can't back up this preferred pronunciation with numbers. Aug 26, 2008
chained_bear Pronounced (and therefore some people spell it as) "weskit." Aug 26, 2008