Hoodie

How to spell hoodie

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hoodie

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hoodie mean?

1. nounA casual sweatshirt or jacket with a hood attached.
2. nounA young person wearing a hooded top, often used with connotations of antisocial behaviour.

Hoodie in a sentence

• He pulled the hoodie over his head when the rain started.

• The shopkeeper complained about a hoodie loitering near the entrance.

• She packed a warm hoodie for the early morning hike.

• The newspaper ran a tired story blaming every hoodie for the town's troubles.

Where does hoodie come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly modern word built on a very old root. The core element, hood, comes from the Old English hod, which named a soft covering for the head and shoulders; it shares an ancestry with the word hat and with the German Hut. For many centuries hood lived quietly inside other words, but in the late twentieth century the casual suffix -ie was added to it, the same friendly ending that gives us movie, selfie and brownie. The result first appeared in North America in the 1990s as a relaxed name for a hooded sweatshirt, and it spread quickly through sportswear and street fashion. In British usage it also took on a second life as a label for a young person wearing such a garment, often with an edge of suspicion attached. The double o in the spelling simply preserves the short vowel of the original hood, so the trap is mostly remembering that single d before the suffix rather than doubling it.

How the word is built

• hood (covering for the head, from Old English hod)
• -ie (informal noun-forming suffix)