Couture

How to spell couture

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce couture

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does couture mean?

1. nounThe design and creation of exclusive, custom-fitted high fashion clothing.

Couture in a sentence

• The museum exhibited gowns from the golden age of French couture.

• Each piece of couture is hand-stitched and made to measure for a single client.

Where does couture come from?

Language of origin: French

Couture comes straight from modern French, where it means 'sewing', 'needlework', or 'dressmaking'. The French word descends from the Old French costure, which in turn grew out of the Vulgar Latin consutura, a noun built on the Latin verb consuere meaning 'to sew together', combining con- 'together' with suere 'to sew'. That same suere root sits behind the English word 'suture', the surgical stitch, which is a handy reminder that couture is fundamentally about stitching. English adopted the word in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Paris became the centre of high fashion, and it is most often met in the phrase 'haute couture', literally 'high sewing', meaning exclusive, custom-fitted clothing. Because it keeps its French shape, the tricky spelling trap is the 'ou' followed by the silent French '-e', which English speakers are tempted to drop or respell phonetically.

How the word is built

• coutur- (from French couture: sewing, dressmaking)
• (silent French -e ending retained in English)