"Mae West" meaning in English

See Mae West in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: Mae Wests [plural]
Etymology: Named after the actress and sex symbol Mae West, who was well known during the war. The inflatable front was taken to be like her busty figure. Head templates: {{en-noun}} Mae West (plural Mae Wests)
  1. (informal) A type of life jacket used by Allied forces in World War II having an inflatable rubber bag on the chest of the wearer. Tags: informal
    Sense id: en-Mae_West-en-noun-XoJDpd6z Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries

Inflected forms

{
  "etymology_text": "Named after the actress and sex symbol Mae West, who was well known during the war. The inflatable front was taken to be like her busty figure.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "Mae Wests",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "Mae West (plural Mae Wests)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Pages with 1 entry",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Pages with entries",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "bold_text_offsets": [
            [
              218,
              227
            ]
          ],
          "ref": "1954, Ian Fleming, “Beau Desert”, in Live and Let Die, London: Pan Books, published 1957, page 192:",
          "text": "The most successful form of shark repellent, according to US Naval Research Laboratory tests, was a combination of copper acetate and a dark nigrosine dye, and cakes of this mixture were apparently now attached to the Mae Wests of all the US Armed Forces.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A type of life jacket used by Allied forces in World War II having an inflatable rubber bag on the chest of the wearer."
      ],
      "id": "en-Mae_West-en-noun-XoJDpd6z",
      "links": [
        [
          "life jacket",
          "life jacket"
        ],
        [
          "World War II",
          "World War II"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(informal) A type of life jacket used by Allied forces in World War II having an inflatable rubber bag on the chest of the wearer."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "informal"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "Mae West"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "Named after the actress and sex symbol Mae West, who was well known during the war. The inflatable front was taken to be like her busty figure.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "Mae Wests",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "Mae West (plural Mae Wests)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English eponyms",
        "English informal terms",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "Pages with 1 entry",
        "Pages with entries",
        "Quotation templates to be cleaned"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "bold_text_offsets": [
            [
              218,
              227
            ]
          ],
          "ref": "1954, Ian Fleming, “Beau Desert”, in Live and Let Die, London: Pan Books, published 1957, page 192:",
          "text": "The most successful form of shark repellent, according to US Naval Research Laboratory tests, was a combination of copper acetate and a dark nigrosine dye, and cakes of this mixture were apparently now attached to the Mae Wests of all the US Armed Forces.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A type of life jacket used by Allied forces in World War II having an inflatable rubber bag on the chest of the wearer."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "life jacket",
          "life jacket"
        ],
        [
          "World War II",
          "World War II"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(informal) A type of life jacket used by Allied forces in World War II having an inflatable rubber bag on the chest of the wearer."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "informal"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "Mae West"
}

Download raw JSONL data for Mae West meaning in English (1.5kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-08-02 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-07-06 using wiktextract (d9fa233 and 9e92f4b). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.