Dresses

How to spell dresses

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dresses

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dresses mean?

1. nounMore than one dress, the one-piece garments worn chiefly by women and girls.
2. verbPuts on clothing, or arranges and prepares something; the third-person singular form of dress.

Dresses in a sentence

• noun

  The boutique displayed a rack of summer dresses near the window.

• verb

  He always dresses in a dark suit for important meetings.

• noun

  She packed two dresses for the wedding weekend.

• verb

  The nurse carefully dresses the wound before applying a fresh bandage.

Where does dresses come from?

Language of origin: French

This word traces back through Old French dresser (also spelled drecier), which meant to arrange, to set in order, or to make straight. That verb grew out of an unrecorded Vulgar Latin form directiare, itself derived from the Latin directus, the past participle of dirigere meaning to set straight or to direct. When the word arrived in English in the 1300s it carried the broad sense of preparing, arranging, or putting things in proper order, which is why we still speak of dressing a wound, dressing a stage, or dressing a shop window. The narrower meaning of putting on clothing, and of the garment itself, developed later as one specialised branch of that older idea of arranging and making ready. The doubled s in the modern spelling simply reflects the short e vowel and the regular pattern of adding -es to a base ending in s.

How the word is built

• dress (from Old French dresser: to arrange, make straight)
• -es (plural noun / third-person singular verb suffix)