smalls

1. 1
   nouncolloquialCommonwealthIrelandUKplural

   Underwear, especially the smaller garments worn next to the body.

   She pegged her smalls along the washing line behind the cottage.

   He always kept his smalls separate from the heavier laundry.

   Similarunderwear, undies, underclothes, underthings

   Note

   A plural-only word from informal speech in Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, built simply from small. It takes a plural verb and usually comes with a possessive or a counting phrase: his smalls, a fresh set of smalls. Australian writing shows how far it traveled, from Henry Handel Richardson's Australia Felix (1917) to Donna Wheeler's Melbourne & Victoria City Guide (2008), where a traveler unpacks a toothbrush and fresh smalls.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of small.

   Only a handful of smalls were left on the clearance rack.

   The packers ran short of smalls and substituted the next size up.

   Note

   The ordinary countable plural, with a singular standing beside it: one small, several smalls. It covers items made in that size and the people who fit them. Having a singular is what sets it apart from the underwear word and the other plural-only senses, which offer no single small to count.

3. 3
   nounplural

   Small articles of merchandise; goods of low value or modest size.

   The peddler's pack held nothing but smalls: needles, thread, and tin whistles.

   Customers came for the furniture but often left clutching a few smalls instead.

   Similartrinkets, knick-knacks, oddments, notions

   Note

   Railway freight gave this sense its working life, mostly as a modifier in front of another noun. Modern Railways in December 1963 wrote of smalls traffic and asked whether smalls rates would rise, meaning the business of carrying small goods as a class apart from bulk loads. Like the underwear word, it stays plural even when it describes something: smalls traffic, never small traffic.

4. 4
   nouncolloquialpluralabbreviationellipsis

   Short for small ads.

   Most of the rooms for rent in town were advertised in the smalls.

   He scanned the smalls every Friday looking for a cheap motorcycle.

   Note

   A clipping that drops the noun and keeps the adjective: small ads becomes smalls. The word is used only in the plural, for the classified columns as a whole. Morton J. A. McDonald, writing in 1957, explained it as want ads and noted that provincial English papers still ran them on the front page. Context keeps it apart from the underwear meaning.

5. 5
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of small.

   Note

   Here the spelling belongs to a verb, not a noun plural. The verb small once meant "make little," a transitive use now obsolete, and it still means "become small, dwindle." The intransitive use is the safer choice: a voice that smalls into silence. A transitive line such as the sky smalls the walker reads as deliberate archaism, so use it only when that old flavor is wanted.

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