Page Threen.
/ˌpeɪdʒ ˈθriː/, U.S. /ˌpeɪdʒ ˈθri/ Originally and chiefly British.
A feature which appeared daily on page three of the Sun newspaper, and included a pin-up picture of a topless or semi-nude young woman; a similar feature appearing in other tabloids.A proprietary name.Recorded earliest in Page Three girl n. at Compounds 2.The Page Three feature first appeared in November 1970 and was discontinued in January 2015.
ΚΠ
1975 Sun 12 June 3 (caption) Lovely Jackie Brocklehurst makes her bow today as a super Sun Page Three girl.
1976 Economist (Nexis) 27 Nov. 103 The young ladies of the Sun's page 3 have become as famous in their fashion, what little they wear of it, as the girls on the Pirelli calendar.
1986 Times 26 Aug. 2/2 330,000 men..said they turn to page three before reading anything.
1999 Sun 22 June (Page 3 Suppl.) 3/3 Tracy Coleman has been at the top of the Page 3 tree since she first posed for us in 1991... She said: ‘Page 3 has changed my life and I wouldn't swap it for the world.’
Compounds
C1. General attributive.
ΚΠ
1981 Washington Post (Nexis) 28 July a1 Britain's largest-selling tabloid, Rupert Murdoch's racy Sun, has renamed itself the ‘Royal Sun’ for this week [sc. the week of a Royal wedding] and christened its bare-breasted pinup girls ‘Page Three Princesses.’
1992 Pornography & Capitalism (I Spy Productions) in C. Itzin Pornography (1993) iii. 83 Page 3 models, pored over by thirteen million Sun readers, became household names.
2002 Sunday Herald (Glasgow) 8 Dec. 11/2 Fox, then a 20-year old Page Three stunna.
C2.
Page Three girl n. a topless or nude model whose photograph has appeared as part of a regular series in some tabloid newspapers.
ΘΚΠ
the mind > attention and judgement > attractiveness > [noun] > specifically a model
supermodel1967
Page Three girl1975
1975Page Three girl [see main sense].
1979 Brit. Jrnl. Photogr. 10 Aug. 766/2 If we saw such associations in an image together with a page 3 girl we would suspect a satirical intention.
1999 J. Burchill Married Alive ix. 135 By lunchtime it was all over the school. Mark Kaplan had got off with a Page 3 girl!
This is a new entry (OED Third Edition, March 2005; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
<
n.1975