Chaps

How to spell chaps

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce chaps

What does chaps mean?

1. nounInformal term for men or fellows, especially as a friendly way of referring to a group.
2. nounSturdy leather leg coverings worn over trousers to protect the legs while riding.
3. verbOf cold or wind, to make skin sore, dry, and cracked.

Chaps in a sentence

• noun

  The chaps from accounts always book the same table at the pub on Fridays.

• noun

  The ranch hand buckled on his leather chaps before mounting the horse.

• verb

  A bitter winter wind quickly chaps any skin left uncovered.

• noun

  A couple of chaps helped me lift the wardrobe up the stairs.

• noun

  Worn chaps shielded her thighs from the thorny brush on the trail.

• verb

  The dry mountain air chaps her lips within an hour of the climb.

Where does chaps come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word actually braids together two different histories. The informal British sense, a 'chap' meaning a man or fellow, is a shortening of 'chapman', from the Old English 'ceapman', which literally meant a trader or dealer; 'ceap' meant barter, trade, or price, and it survives in the place name Cheapside and in the word 'cheap'. By the 1700s 'chap' had drifted from 'someone you do business with' to simply 'fellow' or 'bloke', and its plural 'chaps' became a breezy way to address a group of men. The cowboy sense is unrelated: those leather leg coverings come from the Spanish 'chaparreras' (also 'chaparejos'), protective overgarments named for riding through 'chaparro', the scrubby oak thicket they shielded the legs from, which is why some riders still pronounce them 'shaps'. The verb sense, of skin chapping in cold weather, is a separate Middle English word meaning to crack or split. The shared spelling 'chaps' is a happy accident of three roots converging on the same four letters.

How the word is built

• chap (fellow, from chapman)
• -s (plural); separately chaps (leg coverings) from Spanish chaparreras