Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A collar for the neck, of cambric, lace, or the like, made to turn over and lie upon the shoulders, and so named to distinguish it from the stiff ruff: worn in the seventeenth century.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • The bands worn by the barristers and clergy of our own time are modifications of this antique falling-band, and like the coif cap of the modern sergeant, they bear only a faint likeness to their originals.

    A Book About Lawyers John Cordy Jeaffreson 1866

  • Whitelock's speech seems to have been made shortly before the bar accepted the falling-band as an article of dress admissible in courts of law.

    A Book About Lawyers John Cordy Jeaffreson 1866

  • If portraits may be trusted, the falling-band of Charles I. 's time, bore considerable resemblance to the falling neck-frill, which twenty years since was very generally worn by quite little boys, and is still sometimes seen on urchins who are about six years of age.

    A Book About Lawyers John Cordy Jeaffreson 1866

  • Whitelock, who had not yet astonished the more decorous magnates of his country by wearing a falling-band at the Oxford Quarter Sessions; Edward

    A Book About Lawyers John Cordy Jeaffreson 1866

  • In regarding the falling-band as the germ of the ruff, the Water-Poet differs from those writers who, with greater appearance of reason, maintain that the ruff was the parent of the band.

    A Book About Lawyers John Cordy Jeaffreson 1866

  • a falling-band, which was unusual for lawyers in those days, and in this garb I gave the charge to the Grand Jury.

    A Book About Lawyers John Cordy Jeaffreson 1866

  • The gentlemen and freeholders seemed well pleased with my charge, and the management of the business of the sessions; and said they perceived one might speak as good sense in a falling-band as in a ruff. "

    A Book About Lawyers John Cordy Jeaffreson 1866

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