Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Usage examples of "button-hole".
He had ripped his collar off his neck in his haste to be gone ere she came in, and there it lay with bursten button-holes.
For many months I had been envying the boys who wore the dark-red badges of the Komsomol in their button-holes.
Upon his legs he wore red stockings rolled up over the joint of the knee, his breeches were of blue drab, with vellum button-holes, and garters of gold lace, his waistcoat of scarlet, his coat of rusty black cloth, his hair, twisted into a ramilie, hung down to his rump, of the colour of jet, and his hat was adorned with a white feather.
I was taking a walk in the Tuileries, not thinking any more of my female extortioner, when a small man, with his hat cocked on one side of his head and a large nosegay in his button-hole, and sporting a long sword, swaggered up to me and informed me, without any further explanation, that he had a fancy to cut my throat.
Carrados raised an accusing finger and pointed to the little bunch of violets with which the impressionable young man had adorned his button-hole.
He had his tartan plaid thrown about him, a large blue bonnet with a knot of black ribband like a cockade, a brown short coat of a kind of duffil, a tartan waistoat with gold buttons and gold button-holes, a bluish philibeg, and tartan hose.
Mendicity on commission stooped in their high shoulders, shambled in their unsteady legs, buttoned and pinned and darned and dragged their clothes, frayed their button-holes, leaked out of their figures in dirty little ends of tape, and issued from their mouths in alcoholic breathings.
His clothes, of a nondescript brown mixture, were threadbare and marked with stains, dusty in the folds, with ragged button-holes.
He was dressed in a blue frock-coat, buttoned up to the chin, and wore at his button-hole the rosette of an officer of the Legion of Honor.
Many wore the silver fleur-de-lys suspended from the white-watered ribbon, which had not yet wholly disappeared from button-holes in the year 1817.
He had much more the air of a lounger in the Mall or the Alameda – the latter rather, since his elegant suit of violet taffetas with gold-embroidered button-holes was in the Spanish fashion.