Meaning
A pompous, self-important and rigidly formal person who is all dignity and no substance. The label implies that, like a padded garment on a dummy, the person's formality fills an essentially empty shell. Informal and definitely derogatory, though more contemptuous than vicious. Regional use: General English, originally American (clothing origin).
Origin
First recorded in 1913, when it was glossed as 'a pompous, ineffectual, conservative person' - squarely an early-20th-century American coinage, as the anchor claims. The evident image is of a shirt stuffed with padding: the sort of filled garment used on a tailor's dummy or shop-window mannequin (or a scarecrow), which has the outward shape of a dressed person with nobody inside. Etymonline's entries for 'stuffed' show the literal background: garments described as stuffed or padded from the mid-15th century and the taxidermy sense of filling prepared skins from the 1550s. The transfer to a person fussy with empty formality follows naturally, and early-20th-century writers plainly relished the sawdust implication. The dating is documented; the dummy-to-person step is the standard, sensible explanation rather than a separately recorded chain of evidence.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a pompous old stuffed shirt
- an old stuffed shirt
- stuffed shirts
Usage Examples
- The new chairman turned out to be a stuffed shirt who cared more about the seating plan at dinner than about the actual agenda.
- Half the guests were journalists in hiking boots, so the club's stuffed shirts hardly knew where to look.
- She runs a profitable studio without a single stuffed shirt in management, which is exactly why people stay.