EVENING DRESS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does evening dress mean? 

• EVENING DRESS (noun)
  The noun EVENING DRESS has 1 sense:

1. attire to wear on formal occasions in the evening

  Familiarity information: EVENING DRESS used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• EVENING DRESS (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Attire to wear on formal occasions in the evening

Classified under:

Nouns denoting man-made objects

Synonyms:

evening clothes; evening dress; eveningwear; formalwear

Hypernyms ("evening dress" is a kind of...):

attire; dress; garb (clothing of a distinctive style or for a particular occasion)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "evening dress"):

balldress (a suit or dress for formal occasions)

dinner dress; dinner gown; evening gown; formal (a gown for evening wear)

black tie; dinner jacket; tux; tuxedo (semiformal evening dress for men)

dress suit; full dress; tail coat; tailcoat; tails; white tie; white tie and tails (formalwear consisting of full evening dress for men)

 Context examples 

An opera hat was pushed to the back of his head, and an evening dress shirt-front gleamed out through his open overcoat.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The photograph was of Irene Adler herself in evening dress, the letter was superscribed to “Sherlock Holmes, Esq. To be left till called for.”

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The long, many-pillared room, with its mirrors and chandeliers, was crowded with full-blooded, loud-voiced men-about-town, all in the same dark evening dress with white silk stockings, cambric shirt-fronts, and little, flat chapeau-bras under their arms.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)