girls

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of girl.

   The girls walked to school together every morning.

   Three girls signed up for the new science club.

   Note

   The regular plural carries every meaning of the singular: female children, daughters, girlfriends, female friends, young women. Applied to grown women it can sometimes give offense, so in careful or formal writing women is the safer plural. In colloquial speech it also works as a term of address to a group. The same spelling serves the verb form and slang for breasts.

2. 2
   nounslangplural

   A playful slang term for a woman's breasts.

   She bought a sports bra to keep the girls in place during her workout.

   Squeezed into the cocktail dress, she joked that the girls were on full display tonight.

   Similarboobs, breasts

   Note

   Slang from women's own speech, and it travels with the definite article: the girls, as in Women's Health's 2008 promise of a push-up top that keeps the girls "sunny-side up." It exists only in the plural, so no single breast is ever a girl. Because it belongs to women's speech, it sits most comfortably in a woman's mouth, joking about her own figure.

3. 3
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of girl.

   Note

   Here girl works as a transitive verb, and the -s form needs a singular subject and a stated object: the campaign girls the drill. Two meanings share the form. One is gendering something as a girl's or as meant for girls. The other, informal, is staffing a place with girls. Without its object it collapses back into the plural noun, so the object usually follows right away.

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