Jean

How to spell jean

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce jean

What does jean mean?

1. nounA heavy twilled cotton cloth used chiefly for hard wearing clothing.

Jean in a sentence

• The workshop aprons were cut from tough jean cloth.

• She ordered several metres of dark jean to make the curtains.

Where does jean come from?

Language of origin: Italian

This word traces back to the Italian port city of Genoa, which medieval English speakers knew through Old French as 'Jannes' or 'Gene'. The sturdy twilled cotton cloth produced and traded there became known as 'Gene fustian', and by the 1500s English had clipped this down to simply 'jean'. The cloth was prized for work clothing because it was hard wearing, and centuries later the plural 'jeans' came to name the trousers cut from it. A close cousin of the word is 'denim', whose name records a different city, coming from 'de Nimes', meaning 'from Nimes' in France. The singular 'jean' still names the fabric itself, which is the spelling trap, since it sounds exactly like 'gene', the unit of heredity, yet has a completely separate origin.

How the word is built

• jean (from Genoa, the Italian city where the cloth was first made)

Words that sound like jean

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• gene: A unit of heredity, made of DNA, that determines a particular inherited characteristic.