Meaning
Made by a tailor to fit one individual buyer, as opposed to ready-made; by extension, anything shaped or adapted exactly to a particular person, purpose or need, as in a tailor-made solution or a role that was tailor-made for her. In dated usage tailor-mades were factory-made cigarettes as opposed to hand-rolled ones. Hyphenate as a compound adjective before a noun. The figurative use now dominates. Made-to-measure and bespoke overlap with the literal sense in British English. The cigarette sense of tailor-mades is historical. Regional use: All English varieties; the cigarette noun dated and chiefly recorded in British and Commonwealth English.
Origin
Formed within English by compounding tailor and made. The OED's factsheet gives earliest evidence in 1832, from Thomas Carlyle, with senses developing in tailoring (1830s), dressmaking (1870s) and tobacco (1920s); Merriam-Webster likewise dates the adjective to 1832 and the noun to 1892. The figurative sense is strikingly early: Etymonline records it by 1830, quoting the Greenfield, Massachusetts Gazette of 11 May 1830 sneering at 'tailor-made, essenced time killers' - made or shaped to suit a person, usually slightingly - so the references diverge by two years, reported here. Wiktionary illustrates the garment noun with Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915): 'Leonora always appeared to me at her best in a blue tailor-made.' The cigarette sense, tailor-mades for manufactured cigarettes as opposed to roll-ups, sits in the OED's 1920s subject band and survives as prison slang.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- made to measure
- tailor-mades
Usage Examples
- The scholarship was tailor-made for her: violin, chemistry, and years of community work.
- He was married in a grey tailor-made suit cut on Savile Row.
- Rolling his own was cheaper than buying tailor-mades, he said, and tasted better too.