Kilt
noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A traditional Scottish garment, usually worn by men, having roughly the same morphology as a wrap-around skirt, with overlapping front aprons and pleated around the sides and back, and usually made of twill-woven worsted wool with a tartan pattern.
- 2 a knee-length pleated tartan skirt worn by men as part of the traditional dress in the Highlands of northern Scotland wordnet
- 3 Any Scottish garment from which the above lies in a direct line of descent, such as the philibeg, or the great kilt or belted plaid historical
- 4 A plaid, pleated school uniform skirt sometimes structured as a wraparound, sometimes pleated throughout the entire circumference; also worn by boys in the 19th-century United States.
"I was about to say that I had known the Celebrity from the time he wore kilts. But I see I will have to amend that, because he was not a celebrity then, nor, indeed, did he achieve fame until some time after I left New York for the West."
- 5 A variety of non-bifurcated garments made for men and loosely resembling a Scottish kilt, but most often made from different fabrics and not always with tartan plaid designs.
- 1 To gather up (skirts) around the body.
"Else at her new place worked outdoor and indoor, she'd to kilt her skirts (if they needed kilting – and that was damned little with those short-like frocks) and go out and help at the spreading of dung […]."
- 2 Nonstandard form of killed: simple past and past participle of kill. alt-of, colloquial, nonstandard, obsolete
"that unspotted Lamb, That for the Sins of all the World was kilt"
Example
More examples"What does a Scotsman wear under his kilt?"
Etymology
From Middle English kilten (“to tuck up, gird”), apparently from North Germanic, ultimately from Old Norse kelta, kjalta (“skirt; lap”). Perhaps from Proto-Germanic *kelt-, *kelþǭ, *kilþį̄ (“womb”), from Proto-Indo-European *gelt- (“round body; child”). Cognate with Danish kilte (“to tuck”), Swedish kilta (“to swathe”). Related to English child.
From Middle English kilt, equivalent to kill + -t.
Related phrases
More for "kilt"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.