trousers

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“
He would have chased the faun into seclusion until he could clothe him in English trousers, and would have rendered the Venus of Milo into bits.

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Definitions (3)

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  1. A garment for men, extending from the waist to the ankles, covering the lower part of the trunk and each leg separately; originally, tightly fitting drawers; pantaloons. See strossers. In the early part of the nineteenth century long frilled drawers reaching to the ankles were worn by girls and women, and called trousers. The youth and people of fashion, when in the country, wear trowsers, with shoes and stockings. Pococke, Description of the East, II. ii. 10. Trousers (braccæ) were not worn till after the Parthian and Celtic wars, and even then only by soldiers who were exposed to northern climates. Encyc. Brit., VI. 457. On the abandonment of the latter [bases] these large breeches or sloppes became an important and splendid part of apparell; and while the long hose were either supplanted by or new christened the trauses [read trouses], the upper stock or the breeches worn over them received the name of trunk hose. Planché.
  2. Synonyms Breeches, Trousers, Pantaloons. Breeches are properly short clothes, reaching just below the knee; the use of the word for trousers is erroneous and vulgar. Trousers is the old word for the garment common in Occidental nations to cover the legs of men; many, especially in England, still insist upon the word, and confine pantaloons to its historical sense. Many, however, especially in America, are satisfied with pantaloons (colloquially, pants) for trousers.

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Examples (50)

  • Later a substitute for the trousers was adopted, consisting of high shoes with buttoned gaiters fitting in the tops and extending up over the leg, and an effort was made to change the name to the “American costume,” but the people would not have it and “Bloomer” it will remain for all time. —  The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, v1
  • I knew the signs of it now, not just the ravenous hunger that bread could not assuage, but also that my trousers were almost loose on me. —  forestmage
  • His clothes didn't fit him properly any more; the trousers were an inch too short and the arms of the shirt didn't cover his wrists. —  Culture | guardian.co.uk
  • Angela Towler and Martin Joyce used Arvo Pärt's Sonogram for their See Me of 2008, whose three girls and three boys in Turkish trousers included Towler, Joyce, Whitley and again Brahmania.
  • Y.) were paroled to distribute coats (or blouses), trousers, and shoes, among the enlisted men in their three prisons. —  Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons A Personal Experience, 1864-5
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Etymologies (1)

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  1. Formerly also trowsers, trowzers, trossers; a later form, with apparently accidental intrusion of r, of trouses, trowses (also trooze, trews), from Old French trousses, plural, trunk-hose, breeches, plural of trousse, bundle, package: see truss, of which trousers is thus ult. a differentiated plural.
 

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/ˈtraʊzərs/
by Lee Davis-Thalbourne

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