Drawers

How to spell drawers

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce drawers

What does drawers mean?

1. nounThe sliding storage boxes that pull out from a desk, chest, or cabinet.
2. nounAn old-fashioned term for undergarments worn on the lower body.

Drawers in a sentence

• She folded the towels and stacked them in the bottom drawers.

• The museum displayed Victorian drawers alongside other period clothing.

• The old desk had three lockable drawers for files.

• In the old novel a character dashed outside in nothing but his drawers.

Where does drawers come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'drawer', an agent noun built from the verb 'draw', which comes from Old English 'dragan', meaning 'to pull, drag, or haul'. A drawer in furniture is literally a box that you pull out, so the name captures the action of drawing it open; this furniture sense settled into English in the 1500s as cabinetmaking flourished. The clothing sense, an old term for an undergarment for the lower body, arose at the same period because the garment was something you 'drew on' over the legs. The same Germanic root for pulling lies behind everyday relatives such as 'draught' and 'drag'. The tricky part of the spelling is the silent middle: the 'aw' followed by '-ers' produces a single smooth sound, so writers sometimes drop the 'w' or muddle the ending.

How the word is built

• draw (to pull)
• -er (thing that does/is acted on)
• -s (plural)