Clothes

How to spell clothes

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce clothes

What does clothes mean?

1. nounItems worn to cover the body, such as shirts, trousers, and dresses.

Clothes in a sentence

• She folded the clean clothes and put them away in the drawer.

• He packed warm clothes for the trip to the mountains.

Where does clothes come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word descends from the Old English clath, which meant a piece of cloth and also a garment, and its plural form clathas referred to the things people wore. This in turn came from a shared Germanic root that gave related words across the old Germanic languages, all circling the idea of woven material used to cover the body. Over the centuries the singular 'cloth' settled into meaning the fabric itself, while the plural 'clothes' specialised into meaning the garments made from it. The silent letters that make the spelling tricky are a fossil of that older pronunciation: the 'th' was once sounded distinctly, but in modern speech 'clothes' is usually flattened to sound almost exactly like the verb 'close', which is the main reason adults drop the 'th' when writing it. Remembering that 'clothes' literally hides the word 'cloth' inside it is the surest way to keep that buried 'th' on the page.

How the word is built

• cloth (from Old English clath: cloth, garment)
• -es (plural suffix)

Words that sound like clothes

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• close: To shut something, or to bring it to an end.