wife-beatern.

1650 M. à Vauts Husband's Authority Unvail'd viii. 84 If Wife-Beating be wicked or sinfull..I cannot have justly incurred th' account of a Wife-Beater.

1713 T. Rands Pax in Crumena 90 If fumbling Wife-Beaters to London are sent, For want of Young Men, then I'll be content That my Husband be Chose.

1753 Newcastle Gen. Mag. Aug. 426/2 Let the criminal do penance..having his neck decorated with a halter and a large skin of parchment affixed to it..with the words a wife-beater written upon it.

1835 Daily Evening News (Jeffersonville, Indiana) 19 Nov. It is reported that there is a wife beater near town. He ought to be waited upon by half a dozen men with a good sized bundle of switches.

1892 Boston (Mass.) Jrnl. 21 Nov. 4/1 If the whipping-post has a mission, it is for the punishment of wife-beaters.

1937 E. S. Bates Inside Out viii. 348 The father was much like his neighbours, drunkard and wife-beater till the day of his death.

1982 D. Francis Banker 63 He might be a secret wife-beater, who can tell?

2011 D. Monroe On Outskirts of Normal 7 My second husband turned out to be a wife-beater.

1993 Crazy Stanford Law Students on Acid—True Crime!! in alt.drugs (Usenet newsgroup) 18 Nov. Pee-Wee had the emaciated body of Tolkien's Gollum and sported brown khakis and a wifebeater tanktop.

1994 Boston Globe 28 Sept. 40/1 Bowling shirts are in, wife beaters are out.

1999 Oshkosh (Wisconsin) Advance Titan 15 Sept. 16 A beefcake in a wife beater.

2002 Mirror (Nexis) 24 Aug. 5 Proper homeboys show off their smooth-as-silk torsos with an open tracksuit top, or mesh wife-beater vest.

2006 Time Out N.Y. 26 Oct. 192/1 The newly minted rapper..can usually be found smoking a blunt in a banquette crawling with strippers..and making endless Starbucks runs in a wife-beater.