Clothings

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Articles of fabric that are worn to cover the body, including items like shirts, pants, and dresses
2. The various types of garments individuals use for protection against the elements and to enhance appearance
3. Items made from textiles designed for wear, serving both functional and aesthetic purposes in daily life

Etymology: "Clothings" is the plural of "clothing," a mass noun that rarely takes an s, so the plural appears mainly when someone means several kinds of garments. The base word is formed from "clothe" plus the suffix "-ing," a pattern that turns a verb into a noun for the act or result of doing it, so "clothing" originally named the act of dressing someone before it came to mean the garments themselves. The root "clothe" goes back to Old English, and the -ing ending in "clothing" comes from Old English "-ung" by way of Middle English, where the word appeared as "clothing" or "clathing." Its ancestor reconstructed for Proto-West Germanic is "*klaiþungu," which shows the same sense of the noun formed from the verb. Across the Germanic languages the word has close relatives, including German "Kleidung," Dutch "kleding," and Danish "klædning," all meaning clothing. Scots "clathing" and "claithing" are the same word in another dialect, and the English dialect form "cleading" is a doublet of it, meaning the two forms split from one source and took different paths into the language.

Synonyms: apparel, garments, clothes, attire, wear