When was the word T-shirt first used?

The earliest printed use in the Oxford English Dictionary is a Daily Princetonian advertisement for baseball goods dated 4 March 1912, which lists T shirts after the bats. F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, published on 26 March 1920, is the dictionary's next quotation and the one usually credited.

What do British people call T-shirts?

British people call them T-shirts too, although the Oxford English Dictionary labels the word as originally US. The difference is the vest: in British English a vest is the undershirt worn next to the skin, while in North American English a vest is what the British call a waistcoat.

What is slang for a T-shirt?

Tee is the short form, and as a word it is simply the name of the letter T, which Etymonline records from the 1610s, three centuries before the word T-shirt. It is unrelated to the golf tee, which Etymonline traces to the Scottish teaz. In the US Navy the cotton undershirt went by skivvy shirt, the name All Hands magazine used in 1947.

Did the US Navy invent the T-shirt?

No. Nobody is known to have invented it, and Emma McClendon, a fashion studies professor at St. John's University, told Snopes that people in the United States and Europe wore versions of it as underwear in the 19th century. The Navy's 1905 regulations specify a white, buttonless knit undershirt with sleeves no lower than the elbow, and neither they nor the 1913 edition, as reprinted in 1917, uses the word T-shirt.

What Does the T in T-Shirt Stand For? A Shape, Since 1912

Q: What does the T in T-shirt stand for?

The T in T-shirt does not stand for a word. It describes the shape: laid flat, the body and sleeves form a capital T, which the Oxford English Dictionary includes in its definition and Etymonline gives as the reason for the name.

An advertisement for baseball goods in the Daily Princetonian of 4 March 1912 announces “Our 1912 baseball goods are on display”, lists “400 carefully selected base ball bats”, and then offers “T shirts.” The pitch that follows is “Just the thing for early Spring work.”

The Oxford English Dictionary puts this advertisement at the head of its entry for the word, eight years ahead of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel that usually gets the credit.

What does the T in T-shirt stand for?

The T stands for no word at all. It is a picture of the garment: laid flat, the body and sleeves make a capital T. The Oxford English Dictionary includes that shape in its definition, Etymonline says the name refers to it, and neither treats the letter as short for training or any other word.

The American Heritage Dictionary is the only one of the three to hedge: “Perhaps from its being shaped like the letter T, when spread out.”

Tee is the letter’s name, spelled out

The other spelling works the same way. Etymonline records tee as “the name of the letter T” from the 1610s, so a tee shirt is a T-shirt with its letter written out. The golf tee is unrelated, back-formed by 1721 from the Scottish teaz of 1673, and in its original form it “was a little heap of sand.”

The word’s earliest known uses sit beside bats and sweaters

Fitzgerald’s line is the dictionary’s second quotation. In This Side of Paradise, published by Scribner’s in 1920, Amory Blaine sets out for school in New England with “six suits summer underwear, six suits winter underwear, one sweater or T shirt, one jersey, one overcoat, winter, etc.” The novel spells it the way the advertisement did, as two words.

As recently as 2021, Literary Hub, citing the OED, called Fitzgerald the first writer to use the term in print. The dictionary entry that Snopes reproduced in March 2025 opens with the 1912 advertisement instead.

Two years after the novel, a 29 June 1922 piece in the Rutland Daily Herald of Vermont, quoted by Etymonline, singled out “the sweat shirt, or ‘T’ shirt, which has been used for a good many years among athletes”. It compared the shirt with the garment Fitzgerald had listed beside it: “A ‘T’ shirt will do everything a sweater does and more, while it costs fully a quarter less.”

The Navy’s paperwork says undershirt

The standard history hands the garment to the US Navy. Wikipedia’s article states that “In 1913, the U.S. Navy first issued them as undergarments,” and its footnote for that sentence points to a history page on Tee Fetch, a T-shirt review site. The archived copy it links to never mentions 1913, and dates the Navy issue to “sometime around the Spanish American War.”

The Navy’s regulations describe the garment by 1905, and neither the 1905 book nor the 1913 edition, as reprinted in 1917, uses the word T-shirt. The book dated 21 January 1905 specifies enlisted undershirts “bleached white”, with an “elastic collarette on neck opening, with no buttons”. Its light version had “Sleeves not to come below the elbow”, and “Cotton undershirts of identical pattern may be worn in warm climates.”

That reprint of the 1913 regulations folds in changes made up to 1917, and it sets out three weights of undershirt. The elbow-sleeved shirt is now the medium, and a new light undershirt is “of the lightest weight cotton consistent with durability”, with “sleeves only long enough to cover the armpit.”

The Navy wrote the garment into its regulations by 1905 and called it an undershirt. The name turns up first in a 1912 advertisement that sold T shirts beside baseball bats, the oldest use the Oxford English Dictionary has found.

The Navy’s own magazine was still using other names in 1947. That March, All Hands reported that “skivvy shirt shortages” were “about over”, and in May it relayed a notice keeping “undershirts, cotton” on the critical list, in items reprinted by the Naval History and Heritage Command. Older underwear had older names: the shift that a bedchamber woman handed over at Queen Anne’s dressing was, in Etymonline’s gloss, a “body garment, underclothing”.

Only the civilian documents say T shirt

Year	Document	Name used	Context
1905	US Navy uniform regulations	Undershirt	Uniform rules
1912	Daily Princetonian advertisement	T shirts	Baseball goods
1913 (as revised to 1917)	US Navy uniform regulations	Undershirt	Uniform rules
1920	This Side of Paradise	T shirt	A school packing list
1922	Rutland Daily Herald	Sweat shirt, or “T” shirt	Worn by athletes for years
1947	All Hands	Skivvy shirt	A supply shortage

Some letters in names are pictures, and some are abbreviations

Etymonline files the T-shirt beside the T-square and the T-rail, a rail with “a cross-section in the form of a letter T”, and in all three the letter describes an outline. The em of the em dash borrows a letter’s name instead: in printing, Etymonline says, it was originally “the square corresponding in dimensions to the capital M of that type.” The X in Xmas abbreviates a word: it is the Greek letter chi, which Etymonline calls “the first letter of Greek Khristos.”

The soldiers in the training-shirt story arrive too late

The folk explanation says the T stands for training: American soldiers were issued lightweight undershirts called training shirts, in the Second World War or the First, depending on the telling.

Neither war fits. The word was in Princeton’s student paper by March 1912, five years before Congress voted for war in April 1917. The story fails the same way as the one about American troops in Belgium naming french fries: the name is in print before the soldiers arrive.

The shirt’s link to sport is real. The 1922 Herald says athletes had worn it for years, and the 1912 advertisement sold it beside the bats for “early Spring work”. Another guess, that the T means thin, appears in none of the three dictionaries above.

Fitzgerald started classes at Princeton on 24 September 1913, a year and a half after that advertisement ran, and Book One of his novel puts Amory Blaine “on the Princetonian board”. The book usually credited with the word gives its hero a seat at the paper that had printed it eight years earlier. Strictly FYI.