pinafore
/ˈpɪnəfɔː
/noun
1 (also British pinafore dress) A collarless sleeveless dress worn over a blouse or jumper.As a matter of fact, I always had a vision that my secondary school uniform would be the blue pinafore dress with the white blouse inside....
- Their collection includes an extra wide pinafore dress, satin edged wide parka coats in burnt orange, sideways shift dresses and sarong skirts.
- A seven-way skirmish then broke out over a pinafore dress costing 10p, which escalated into a full-scale melee resulting in another 18 lives being lost.
1.1A woman’s loose sleeveless garment, typically full length and worn over clothes to keep them clean.The plump waitress in a plain pink pinafore and dirty apron smiled a gap-toothed grin, red curls pinned back in hair netting....
- When inside the artwork she wears a careful reproduction of the clothing worn by the model, and when she returns to the real world, she is wearing the pinafore just as before.
- As Abbey put her stained pinafore in the sink, she wondered what in the world could make her older sister so sweet on Shad one moment, and then on Zongala the next.
1.2A sleeveless apron-like garment worn over a young girl’s dress, typically having ties or buttons at the back.If they wonder, like I do, what became of that little girl in the pinafore dress....
- While the new work expands upon themes of her earlier photographs, gone are the young twins in pinafores who enacted troubling excerpts from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
- They were playing marbles on the blacktop, even the girls in their pretty pinafores kneeling on the dirty ground, their knees blackened and tiny little pebbles sticking to their skin.
Origin
Late 18th century: from pin + afore (because the term originally denoted an apron with a bib pinned on the front of a dress).