STUFFED SHIRT | Meaning & Definition for UK English | Lexico.com

noun

• A conservative, pompous person.

  • ‘I just want it to be for fun people, not stuffed shirts’
  • ‘So we had this big meeting with some of these executives around a conference table, and talk about your stuffed shirts.’
  • ‘With reference to the story ‘Councillors Oppose Farmer's Housing Plan ’, Holtby parish councillors should take off their stuffed shirts and give this guy a chance.’
  • ‘The film was about a rebel battling against the stuffed shirts, and that's me.’
  • ‘Perhaps they have Personality Parties on the weekend, where they let it all hang out, and then button their stuffed shirts up for the week ahead, and I just haven't been invited to these parties.’
  • ‘The image, rightly or wrongly, is of stuffed shirts dining on caviar and champagne before snoozing in a private box as two overweight ageing juveniles make mad, passionate musical love to each other.’
  • ‘Good for Radio 4 doing a second series after all the stuffed shirts complained about their first one because of their irreverent and unstuffy presentation.’
  • ‘I really really really can't understand why, way back in the early 80s, stuffed shirts somehow portrayed that pop group as the end of music.’
  • ‘Elle's sunny optimism and fashion sense among the sober stuffed shirts of Washington is cute.’
  • ‘I anticipate that any number of stuffed shirts in London will back me up on these conclusions.’
  • ‘At this point Hemmer (a stuffed shirt if I ever saw one) got this grin on his face and asked Cliff if he'd read the Wall Street Journal this morning.’
  • ‘The next year, by way of riposte to the stuffed shirts, Havers achieved fame by qualifying for the Open Championship at the age of 16.’
  • ‘Some of the stuffed shirts at the Commission might be expected to look askance at this sort of harmless nepotism.’
  • ‘What do those stuffed shirts who read the Wall Street Journal wear on casual Fridays?’
  • ‘There are a lot of stuffed shirts out there who would never publicly admit to making an error.’
  • ‘By adding more jocularity, which has included Miles prank-calling Gooden on road trips, Kansas has become a team that is less of a stuffed shirt.’
  • ‘Thus commences a nightlong battle of the sexes, with Woo trying to loosen up the stuffed shirt and Tim trying to tame this female firestorm.’
  • ‘The elder must be respectable - not a sourpuss or a stuffed shirt - but a man who has gained respect.’
  • ‘She sized him up in a minute and a half and told me he was a stuffed shirt and a pretentious snob.’
  • ‘He portrayed that stuffed shirt of a husband seems to be a frightfully correct pillar of the new establishment.’

  conventionalist, traditionalist, orthodox person, conservative, bourgeois, fogey, old fogey, stickler, formalist, diehard, reactionary