T-shirt
- 1A lightweight collarless shirt without buttons, usually short-sleeved and made of cotton, often printed with a picture or slogan.
She designed a T-shirt with a bold silk-screened slogan across the chest.
Vendors outside the stadium hawked cheap cotton T-shirts to arriving fans.
Similartee
Note
Its shape gave it its name: laid flat, body and sleeves form a letter T, and the word dates from the 1920s. Keep both the capital and the hyphen (T-shirt, plural T-shirts), or shorten it to tee. It works readily as a modifier, as in T-shirt sales, which can earn a band more than its tickets. In The Economist in 2013 it stands for casual dress, set against banking's grey suits.
- 2A garment worn next to the skin underneath a shirt or other outer clothing.
In those days a man who walked out to the mailbox in his T-shirt was considered half dressed.
The store stacked its cotton T-shirts in packs of three beside the boxer shorts and socks.
Similarundershirt, vest
Note
Here the word names underwear, a use that now sounds dated. Most readers today picture the everyday outer shirt first. For a layer worn beneath a dress shirt, undershirt is the clearer modern word. Keep this meaning for period dialogue, or recognize it when reading older texts, where a man seen in his T-shirt is simply half dressed.
Use it in a sentence
Write your own sentence with T-shirt, and AI will tell you whether it fits and which meaning you used.
Origin
The name comes from the shirt's shape, which resembles the letter T, and dates from the 1920s.