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Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

shirtsleeves en · NOUN

Meanings

  1. (plural, plural-only) Alternative form of shirt sleeves. ▸ Street clothes, without a jacket or special protection.
    • After a while the sun grew warm enough to remove her sweatshirt and work in shirtsleeves. 1993, Dana Stabenow, A Fatal Thaw, →ISBN:
    • For children in shirtsleeves or summer dresses, the optimum temperature was 24.5 degrees Centigrade, and for children wearing jumpers or blazers, it was 21.5 degrees Centigrade. 1973 December, MA Humphreys, “Classroom Temperature, Clothing and Thermal Comfort--A Study of Secondary School Children in Summertime. Building Research Establishment Current Paper 22/74”, in The Building Services Engineer, volume 41:
    • Even though there were dangerous chemicals about, they worked in their shirtsleeves rather than hazmat suits.
    • In a cluttered study Lincoln sits in shirtsleeves and slippers, at work on the document. 2007, Darrel E. Bigham, Lincoln, Race, and Slavery:
    • While they were drinking prelunch martinis, a staffer entered the room nervously, the urgency of the moment signaled by the fact that he approached Graham in just his shirtsleeves. 2017, R Aldous, Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian:
  2. (form-of, plural) plural of shirtsleeve
    form of shirtsleeve
  3. (plural, plural-only) Alternative form of shirt sleeves. ▸ Non-professional status
    • Creating freedom and functionality around wealth requires allowing the possibility of failure, the risk that the wealth might be lost and shirtsleeves are again the family vestment 2008, Charles A. Lowenhaupt, “Freedom from wealth”, in The Journal of Wealth Management, volume 10, number 4:
    • (see title) 1998, Nancy L. Stokey, “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves: the economics of social mobility”, in Frontiers of Research in Economic Theory, →ISBN:
    • But now I was confonted with a fatalistic concept: Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves. 2016, John L. Ward, Perpetuating the family business: 50 lessons learned from long lasting, successful families in business, page 5:
    • Then the retiree goes back to a real shirtsleeves again if he lives long enough. 2006, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, Alexander Michaelides, Kalin Nikolov, From Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in a Long Lifetime, page 24:

Deriveds

shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations