Idioms

Sunday best

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(one's) Sunday best

One's very best clothes, as one would wear to a Sunday church service. Instead of some big party, let's all get dressed up in our Sunday best and go for lunch at a fancy restaurant for my birthday! This is going to be a formal event, so please come dressed in your Sunday best. You can't wear jeans to a place like that! You need to be decked out in your Sunday best.
See also: best, Sunday
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2024 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.

Sunday best

one's best clothing, which one would wear to church. (See also Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.) We are in our Sunday best, ready to go. I got mud on my Sunday best.
See also: best, Sunday
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs. © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Sunday best

One's finest clothes, as in They were all in their Sunday best for the photographer. This expression alludes to reserving one's best clothes for going to church; indeed, an older idiom is Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes ( meeting here meaning "prayer meeting"). [Mid-1800s]
See also: best, Sunday
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer. Copyright © 2003, 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992 Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Sunday best

n. one’s best clothing, which one would wear to church. We are in our Sunday best, ready to go.
See also: best, Sunday
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions Copyright © 2006 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

best bib and tucker, one's

Dressed in one’s finest clothes. A tucker was an ornamental piece of lace worn by women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to cover the neck and shoulders. A bib was either a fancy frill worn at the front of a man’s shirt or an actual formal shirt front. Their pairing with best dates from the mid-eighteenth century. The word bib appeared in print in America in 1795: “The old gentleman put on his best bib and band [i.e., collar]” (The Art of Courting, Newburyport, Massachusetts). A later locution, dating from the mid-nineteenth century, is one’s Sunday best, also known as Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. It refers to an era when one’s finery was reserved for church (or “prayer meeting”). These Americanisms sound archaic today. See also gussied up.
See also: and, best, bib
The Dictionary of Clichés by Christine Ammer Copyright © 2013 by Christine Ammer
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References in periodicals archive
SUNDAY BEST Grainger Park's senior Sunday team (above) while (right) club volunteer of the year Nicola McCabe is pictured with Jake Bugg All pictures: ANDREW RAGSDALE PHOTOGRAPHY
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The man, dressed in his Sunday best suit, took the girl's soft little hands in his two gnarled ones and placed them together on the ties of the first quilt.
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It's all down to a printing error on the tickets, naturally, but the mind boggles at the prospect of the Riverside Stadium's faithful dusting off their Sunday best for an evening of cultural entertainment on the terraces.
Birmingham Post Comment: Top hat and tails
The experience was akin to dressing up in your Sunday best only to find your favorite church with defaced frescoes, overturned pews, and the central air turned down to 60 degrees.
A kick in the teeth
Such is the everyday scam, dressed up in Sunday best verbiage such as "medical necessity," good utilization or coverage.
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We are a messy people, and too often we put on our shiny Sunday best to cover that up.
Let my people pray
They present themselves in what they consider their Sunday best: beautiful models and drawings and sometimes quasi-poetic and oracular written explanations.
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Anna Eder, who turned 101 this November, arrived for her interview dressed in her Sunday best. Mrs.
The Pride of Ozanam Hall
Sitting in my Sunday best, watching a small section of the world go by, I asked myself: "Would these people feel at home in this church?
View from the trenches: reflections of a minister's spouse
The fashion-conscious browser will quickly note a sartorial indifference to changing styles of clothing and tonsure within which their iconic, and by now, in fact, fashionable image - of the working Englishman in his Sunday best, circa 1960 - has evolved only to accommodate subtle, inevitable signs of increasing age.
The Words of Gilbert and George
The Sunday Best offers any of Pieminister's awardwinning pies on a pile of mash, topped with a Yorkshire pudding filled with swede mash, roast garlic and rosemary potatoes, finished with free range British pork crackling and a pig-inblanket.
It's a pie-lover's dream - a Sunday lunch all wrapped up in pastry
THE Old Firm will be hoping to put on their Sunday best after the Scottish Cup semi-final dates were confirmed.
old firm set to do lunch
KIT SYMONS wants Fulham to put on their Sunday best against Charlton.
SYMONS EYES A KIT MORE GLORY
The Perry children would dress in their Sunday best and head for the Sunday school at Stafford Place Methodist chapel.
The poor but loyal people who lived in Millers Place
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