Mannequin

How to spell mannequin

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce mannequin

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mannequin mean?

1. nounA life-sized model of the human body used to display clothing in shops or to study form in art.

Mannequin in a sentence

• The window dresser changed the coat on the mannequin before the sale began.

• A headless mannequin stood in the corner of the tailor's workshop.

Where does mannequin come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English from French, where mannequin named a jointed artist's model or a dummy used to display clothes. The French had in turn borrowed it from the Dutch word manneken, which literally meant 'little man', built from man plus the diminutive ending -ken. In its earliest English use, around the 1700s, it referred mainly to the lay figure that painters and sculptors posed to study drapery and the human form. By the late 1800s, with the rise of fashion houses, the sense widened to cover both the dummy figure in a shop window and the living models who wore designers' clothes. The same Dutch root also gave English 'manikin', a more anglicised spelling, but the French-flavoured ending -quin is what makes 'mannequin' such a reliable spelling trap; the doubled n and the unexpected qu are the parts adults misremember.

How the word is built

• mannequin, from Dutch manneken: man
• -ken (diminutive), respelled with French -quin