shorts

1. 1
   nounplural

   Short pants worn for sports or in warm weather, reaching no lower than the knees.

   The hikers changed into shorts once the morning chill burned off.

   Cargo shorts have deep pockets running along each leg.

   Note

   The garment behaves grammatically like trousers and pants: it exists only in the plural, even when a single item is meant. Say "these shorts are too loose" rather than "this short," and use a plural verb. To count them, reach for pair: a pair of shorts, three pairs of shorts. The singular short belongs to other words entirely, not to anything you wear.

2. 2
   noundatedplural

   Underwear worn on the lower body, covering the hips and groin beneath one's pants.

   He kept a week's worth of undershirts and shorts in the top drawer.

   After his bath he reached for fresh shorts before dressing.

   Similarunderpants, drawers

   Note

   Mostly a joke word now. It survives in the stock line that a bad enough scare means you need to change your shorts, and George Carlin reaches for it in 3 X Carlin (2015) for comic effect. Because it is dated, in ordinary modern speech it is easily heard as the outer garment. Say underwear when you mean underwear.

3. 3
   noununcountableplural

   Remnants, clippings, or trimmings left over from production processes.

   The mill bagged the day's shorts for resale to a paper plant.

   Workers swept the leftover shorts into bins at the end of each shift.

   Similartrimmings, offcuts, scraps, clippings

   Note

   An industrial noun that is plural in form but uncountable in use. There is no "a short" and no "three shorts" of scrap, only shorts as a mass, swept up or bagged. It belongs to a small family of trade words in which shorts names the shorter, lesser leftovers of a process. The same idea gives the miller's grain fraction and the hemp dresser's waste fiber.

4. 4
   nounplural

   The portion sifted out of milled grain that is next finer than bran, also called pollard.

   The mill sold its shorts to local dairy farmers as cheap feed.

   Wheat shorts contain more fiber than white flour does.

   Similarpollard

   Note

   A miller's term with a precise place in a sequence. James Orchard Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words (1847) ranks it: "the first remove above bran is shorts; the next above that is sharps." Shorts and sharps sit side by side in that grading, so they are easy to confuse. Pollard is the synonym that sits on the bran side of the list.

5. 5
   nounplural

   Hemp fiber of short length and inferior quality.

   Workers separated the long fibers from the shorts before spinning.

   The shorts were sold to make coarse matting and packing material.

   Similartow

6. 6
   noun

   Plural of short.

   Investors covered their shorts as the stock began to climb.

   The electrician found two shorts in the damaged cable.

   Note

   A countable plural, unlike the garment: two shorts in a cable are two short circuits, and a festival's shorts are short films. The same plural covers short vertical videos and, on the ball field, shortstops. Because the spelling matches the summer garment, numbers do the sorting. Three shorts points to one of these countable senses, while a pair of shorts is clothing.

7. 7
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of short.

   The damaged cable shorts the moment it gets wet.

   He routinely shorts tech stocks before earnings season.

   Note

   The -s form that a singular subject takes, and it works both with and without an object. The wet cable shorts uses it on its own; she shorts the circuit or shorts the stock gives it an object. Its spelling collides with the noun plural, so position decides: after a subject it is the verb. An older use meaning "shortens" is now obsolete.

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