Dictionary
Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.
clothes on one's back en · NOUN
Meanings
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(plural, plural-only) The clothes that one is currently wearing, regarded as basic possessions.
In addition to these articles we had a little bit of tinder, and the clothes on our backs. These last were as follows:— Each of us had on a pair of stout canvass trousers, and a pair of sailors’ thick shoes. Jack wore a red flannel shirt, a blue jacket, and a red Kilmarnock bonnet or night-cap, besides a pair of worsted socks, and a cotton pocket-handkerchief, with sixteen portraits of Lord Nelson printed on it, and a union Jack in the middle.
1858, R M Ballantyne, The Coral Island: