Jeans

How to spell jeans

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce jeans

What does jeans mean?

1. nounCasual trousers made from denim or a similar hard-wearing cotton fabric.

Jeans in a sentence

• He packed two pairs of jeans for the weekend trip.

• The cafe has a relaxed dress code, so jeans are perfectly acceptable.

Where does jeans come from?

Language of origin: Italian

The word traces back to Genoa, the Italian port city, which in Middle English and Old French was called Gene or Janne. A sturdy cotton-and-wool twill cloth woven there became known as 'gene fustian', and by the 1500s English shortened this to 'jean' for the fabric itself. For centuries 'jean' simply named hard-wearing trousers made from that cloth, and the plural form 'jeans' followed the usual pattern English uses for two-legged garments such as trousers and breeches. The modern blue version is closely tied to the related fabric 'denim', whose name comes from 'serge de Nimes', a cloth from the French town of Nimes, so two French and Italian place names sit behind today's wardrobe staple. The spelling keeps the soft 'j' and the unexpected 'ea' vowel because it preserves that old link to Genoa rather than spelling the sound phonetically.

How the word is built

• jean (cotton twill cloth originally from Genoa)
• -s (plural)