This week’s theme
Shirts

This week’s words
unshirted
arrow-collar
button-down
sleeveless
shirttail


This week’s comments
AWADmail 985

Next week’s theme
Eponyms

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(SHUHRT-tayl)

MEANING:

noun:	1. The part of a shirt reaching below the waist, especially in the back.
	2. A brief item added at the end of a newspaper article.
	3. Something small or unimportant.
adjective:	1. Very young or immature.
	2. Very small or trivial.
	3. Distantly related.

ETYMOLOGY:

From shirt, from Old English scyrte (shirt) + tail, from Old English toegl (tail). Earliest documented use: 1659. Also see coattail.

USAGE:

“Your mother thinks I’m a damned old idiot to give a shirttail boy a gun that’s just about as tall as the boy is.”
Robert Ruark; Old Man’s Boy Grows Up; Hamish Hamilton; 1962.

“It was a good place to live back then, back when Hollywood was just a shirttail country town on the interurban line.”
Grover Lewis, Dave Hickey, Robert Draper; Splendor in the Short Grass; University of Texas Press; 2005.

“A previously unknown species of sea lily has turned up ... a shirttail cousin to the starfish.”
Science Notebook; Science News (Washington, DC); Oct 8, 2011.

See more usage examples of shirttail in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: