dinner jacket

English

Musician Alberto Semprini wearing a dinner jacket

So called because it is worn by men to formal dinners.

dinner jacket (plural dinner jackets)

(especially US) A jacket, often white, corresponding to a tuxedo jacket.
- 1959, Kurt Vonnegut, chapter 2, in The Sirens of Titan‎, New York: Dial, published 2006, page 49:
  Constant was fully dressed in blue-green evening shorts and a dinner jacket of gold brocade.
- 2012, Tan Twan Eng, chapter 10, in The Garden of Evening Mists, Hachette, page 126:
  He was dressed in a gray dinner jacket and matching trousers.
(British) The formal suit, typically black, that includes this type of jacket.
Synonyms: black tie, penguin suit

Coordinate term: smoking jacket
- 1932, Nevil Shute, chapter 2, in Lonely Road‎:
  [They] sat in a pen in the corner, smoking cigarettes and reading magazines; four or five girls in black silk dresses and the same number of slight effeminate young men in dinner-jackets.
- 1934 October, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], “Chapter 17”, in Burmese Days, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, →OCLC:
  Mr Lackersteen was even wearing a dinner-jacket—white, because of the season—and was completely sober. The boiled shirt and piqué waistcoat seemed to hold him upright and stiffen his moral fibre like a breastplate.
- 1971, E. M. Forster, chapter 37, in Maurice‎, Penguin, published 1972, page 162:
  It was a dinner-jacket evening—not tails, because they would only be three—and though he had respected such niceties for years he found them suddenly ridiculous.

jacket corresponding to a tuxedo jacket

type of formal suit — see tuxedo