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sleeve

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//sliːv//
  • United States//sliv//

The part of a garment that covers the arm.

noun

  1. 1

    The part of a garment that covers the arm.

    The sleeves on my coat are too long.

  2. 2

    A (usually tubular) covering or lining to protect a piece of machinery etc.

    This bearing requires a sleeve so the shaft will fit snugly.

  3. 3

    A protective jacket or case, especially for a record, containing art and information about the contents; also the analogous leaflet found in a packaged CD.

  4. 4

    A tattoo covering the whole arm.

  5. 5

    A narrow channel of water.

    Even from Southhampton ' s shore through Wilts and Somerset The Attrebates in Bark unto the bank of Tames Betwixt the Celtic sleeve and the Sabrinian streams

  6. 6

    Sleave; untwisted thread.

  7. 7

    A serving of beer smaller than a pint, typically measuring between 12 and 16 ounces.

    For example, you may serve a patron a 12 oz sleeve of beer and a 5 oz glass of wine (or alternately 1.5 oz spirits) at the same time.

  8. 8

    A long, cylindrical plastic bag of cookies or crackers, or a similar package of disposable drinking cups.

    A three-alarm fire tore through a family home on Newark's East Side early Saturday morning, completely gutting the two-story residence and tragically claiming a half-sleeve of Oreo cookies that was trapped inside a cupboard.

  9. 9

    A double tube of copper into which the ends of bare wires are pushed so that when the tube is twisted an electrical connection is made. The joint thus made is called a McIntire joint.

Etymology

From Middle English sleve, slefe, from Old English slīef and slīefe (“sleeve”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian Sleeuwe (“sleeve”), West Frisian slúf, Dutch sloof (“apron”), Low German sluve, dialectal German Schlaube. The Canadian sense of “measure smaller than a pint” is due to a former conflict between federal law and provincial law in British Columbia. According to federal law, a pint must be 20 imperial ounces (~568 ml), but according to provincial law at the time, the maximum individual serving size was 500 ml, so an individual portion could not be called a “pint” in British Columbia, and required a different term. The provincial law has been changed, allowing servings of up to 24 oz (~682 ml), but the term remains in use. The term sleeve itself for a cylindrical glass of beer is also found in the UK and Australia (as sleever), and may be due to stacked glasses resembling a sleeve.

verb

  1. 1

    To fit and attach a sleeve to an upper garment (e.g. to a shirt, blouse, sweater, jacket, coat, etc.) or to a folder.

  2. 2

    To hide something up one's sleeve.

    There are certain types of sleeving that are difficult to perform with the shirt sleeves down, and it is difficult and risky to attempt sleeving while wearing a shirt with "French" cuffs.

Forms

plural
sleeves
past tense
sleeved
past participle
sleeved
present participle
sleeving
third person singular
sleeves
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).