shirt button
2
1.0
- noun
:
botón de camisa
- He carefully sewed the shirt button onto the collar to replace the one that had fallen off.
- undo your shirt buttons
- top shirt button
- one of my shirt buttons
Examples
-
Sandy turns away and buttons her top shirt button up.
Fiction book (2000) -
On the seat beside her, Benjamin fidgeted with his shirt buttons.
Fiction book (2001) -
I looked at the baby, who was going after my shirt buttons.
Fiction book (2000) -
If you aim for a shirt button, you might miss by 2 inches.
-
Does Michael Phillips still look at the third shirt button of the person he is talking to?
Blog text (9) -
A shirt button pressed against my nose.
Fiction book (1995) -
She reached over and twisted one of my shirt buttons.
Fiction book (1990) -
Robert Kincaid was perspiring mildly, his top two shirt buttons undone.
Fiction book (1992) -
He loosened his tie and worked to undo the top shirt button, which popped off and landed in his plate, a tiny satellite for the meatball.
Fiction book (1999) -
Lemire cites one mid-eighteenth-century invoice which listed eight types of shirt buttons and fourteen sorts of gilt, plated, tin, and horn buttons.
Academic text (1996)
Synonyms
How Big
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a small fastener on a shirt' is directly and compositionally derived from combining 'shirt' (the garment) and 'button' (a small fastener); it names a part of the shirt in a straightforward noun-noun compound. This pattern is cross-linguistically common (e.g. Spanish 'botón de camisa', French 'bouton de chemise'), so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily infer the meaning.
Etymology
Shirt button comes from the simple picture of a small round button sewn on a shirt that you push through a hole to keep the two sides together. So it means the little fastener used to 'fasten' or 'join' a shirt.