Sunday best

(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