Dress

How to spell dress

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dress

What does dress mean?

1. nounA one-piece garment for a woman or girl, with a top joined to a skirt.
2. verbTo put clothes on yourself or another person.
3. verbTo prepare or finish something, such as a wound, a salad, or food, by treating or seasoning it.

Dress in a sentence

• noun

  She bought a navy dress for the wedding.

• verb

  It takes him ten minutes to dress in the morning.

• verb

  The nurse will dress the cut before you leave.

• noun

  The summer dress hung at the back of the wardrobe.

• verb

  She helped her young son dress for school.

• verb

  Toss the leaves and then dress the salad with oil and vinegar.

Where does dress come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English in the 1300s from the Old French verb dresser (also spelled drecier), which meant to arrange, to set in order, to make straight, or to prepare. That French verb grew out of an unrecorded Vulgar Latin form directiare, itself built on the Latin directus, meaning straight or set in a straight line, the same root that gives us direct and address. The earliest English uses kept the old idea of making something straight or putting it in order, so one could dress timber, dress troops into a line, or dress a wound by preparing and treating it. Only later, around the 1600s, did the sense narrow to the familiar one of putting clothes on the body, and the noun for a woman's garment is more recent still. Because the spelling simply doubles the single consonant after a short vowel, dress rarely trips adults up, though its long family tree linking it to direct and address is easy to miss.

How the word is built

• dress (from Old French dresser: to arrange, make straight, prepare), no affixes in the modern English form