What is "buttonhole"

Usage examples of "buttonhole".

He was looking very neat and trim save for the fact that the unrenewed green carnation in his buttonhole was now rather bedraggled.

Hafner and Ardea in evening dress, with buttonhole bouquets, had the open and happy faces of two citizens who had clear consciences.

It was men, and not women, who invented such sordid and literal faiths as those of the Mennonites, Dunkards, Wesleyans and Scotch Presbyterians, with their antipathy to beautiful ritual, their obscene buttonholing of God, their great talent for reducing the ineffable mystery of religion to a mere bawling of idiots.

They particularly liked the Montgolfier balloon, with its painted decorations still bright and fresh, and its panels fastened together with buttons and buttonholes.

Well, in comes the Commissioner and his friends, very grand indeed, all dressed like swells always do in the evening, I believe, black all over, white tie, shining boots, white kid gloves, flower in their buttonhole, all regular.

First she smelled the jacket and the vest while she took the watch chain out of the buttonhole and removed the pencil holder and the billfold and the loose change from the pockets and placed everything on the dresser, and then she smelled the hemmed shirt as she removed the tiepin and the topaz cuff links and the gold collar button, and then she smelled the trousers as she removed the keyholder with its eleven keys and the penknife with its mother-of-pearl handle, and finally she smelled the underwear and the socks and the linen handkerchief with the embroidered monogram.

Don Gennaro, as I returned home, managed to thank me for my handsome present without laughing, and the next day Don Antonio, to make up for the muscatel wine I had sent him, offered me a gold-headed cane, worth at least fifteen ounces, and his tailor brought me a travelling suit and a blue great coat, with the buttonholes in gold lace.

The President of the United States was continuing to pursue his Rose Garden strategy and would not be in attendance tonight, though some of his handlers were already cruising the press room, buttonholing journalists and trying to apply some prespin to the event.

With a narrow white piping round his waistcoat opening, and a buttonhole of tuberoses, he had tried to repair its deficiencies.

Camperdown, a lanky, cadaverous industry veteran in his mid-sixties, who always dressed impeccably and was never seen without a red rose in his buttonhole, received Celia in his ornate office suite on the eleventh floor-executive country-of the Felding-Roth building in Boonton.

He placed it carefully in die mock buttonhole formed by the false collar of his suitskin.

He straightened his shoulders, placed the crystal snowdrop in the top buttonhole of his coat, now undone.

Above it there was a small buttonhole, and in the buttonhole he placed the snowdrop, the glass flower that his father had given him as a luck token when he had left Wall.

Tristran reached up to the buttonhole of his jerkin and felt it there, as cold and perfect as it had been through all his journeyings.

It was his salutary custom to buttonhole a director afterwards, and ask him whether he thought the coming year would be good or bad.