An evening dress coat; a “swallow-tail.”
1869. He traveled six or seven days’ journey; he was only seventeen years old, and, boy like, he toiled through that long stretch of the vilest, rockiest, dustiest country in Asia, arrayed in the pride of his heart, his beautiful claw-hammer coat of many colors.—Mark Twain, ‘The Innocents Abroad,’ chap. xlvii.
1879. The tails of his claw-hammer coat drag on the ground.—Kingston, ‘Australian Abroad,’ p. 7. (N.E.D.)
