dinner jacket

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

   A jacket, often white, corresponding to a tuxedo jacket.

   • Constant was fully dressed in blue-green evening shorts and a dinner jacket of gold brocade.
   • He was dressed in a gray dinner jacket and matching trousers.
2. 2

   The formal suit, typically black, that includes this type of jacket.

   • [They] sat in a pen in the corner, smoking cigarettes and reading magazines; four or five girls in black silk dresses and the same number of slight effeminate young men in dinner-jackets.
   • Mr Lackersteen was even wearing a dinner-jacket—white, because of the season—and was completely sober. The boiled shirt and piqué waistcoat seemed to hold him upright and stiffen his moral fibre like a breastplate.
   • It was a dinner-jacket evening—not tails, because they would only be three—and though he had respected such niceties for years he found them suddenly ridiculous.

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