dinner jacket

English

Musician Alberto Semprini wearing a dinner jacket

Alternative forms

• dinner-jacket

Etymology

So called because it is worn by men to formal dinners.

Noun

dinner jacket (plural dinner jackets)

1. (especially US) A jacket, often white, corresponding to a tuxedo jacket.
   • 1959, Kurt Vonnegut, chapter 2, in The Sirens of Titan‎^[1], New York: Dial, published 2006, page 49:

     Constant was fully dressed in blue-green evening shorts and a dinner jacket of gold brocade.

   • 2012, Tan Twan Eng, chapter 10, in The Garden of Evening Mists, Hachette, page 126:

     He was dressed in a gray dinner jacket and matching trousers.

2. (British) The formal suit, typically black, that includes this type of jacket.

   Synonyms: black tie, penguin suit

   Coordinate term: smoking jacket

   • 1932, Nevil Shute, chapter 2, in Lonely Road‎^[2]:

     [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.

   • 1934 October, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], “Chapter 17”, in Burmese Days, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, →OCLC:

     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.

   • 1971, E. M. Forster, chapter 37, in Maurice‎^[3], Penguin, published 1972, page 162:

     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.

Derived terms

• dinner-jacketed

Translations

jacket corresponding to a tuxedo jacket

• Catalan: esmòquing m
• Finnish: smokkitakki, smokin takki

type of formal suit — see tuxedo

Further reading

• dinner jacket on Wikipedia.Wikipedia