A strip of thin soft paper folded in creases so as to form separate divisions for different skeins of thread; the paper so folded forming a long and narrow strip.
1761. Sterne, Tr. Shandy, III. xli. What is become of my wife’s thread-paper?
1796. Mme. D’Arblay, Camilla, II. 404. [She] had lost the thread-paper from which she was to mend her gown.
1880. Plain Hints Needlework, 57. It should be cut at each end of the skein and folded securely into a ‘thread paper.’
b. fig. A person of slender or thin figure.
1824. Miss Mitford, Village, Ser. I. 153. So tall and so limp, bent in the middle—a thread-paper, six feet high!
1833. Marryat, P. Simple, xxix. If the common sailors were … such little thread-papers as you.
1881. Huxley, in Life (1900), II. ii. 35. I was a thread paper of a boy myself.
c. attrib. Having the attributes of a thread-paper; long and narrow slender, attenuated; limp, feeble, flimsy.
1746–7. Mrs. Delany, in Life & Corr. (1861), II. 450. I expect soon to see the other extreme of thread-paper heads and no hoops, and from appearing like so many blown bladders, we shall look like so many bodkins stalking about.
1803. Naval Chron., X. 510. Bonaparte’s thread paper flotilla.
1882. P. Fitzgerald, Recreat. Lit. Man (1883), 186 [Landing from a Calais steamer] Singers, actresses, ladies of quality, princesses, queens, all reduced to the common thread-paper level.
1884. Stevenson, New Arab. Nts., 308. She was a thread-paper creature.
