Pants

How to spell pants

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pants

What does pants mean?

1. nounAn outer garment covering the body from the waist to the ankles, with a separate part for each leg.
2. nounAn undergarment worn under trousers or a skirt, covering the lower body.
3. adjectiveInformal British term meaning of very poor quality or no good.
4. verbOf a person or animal: breathes with short, quick, audible breaths, usually after exertion.

Pants in a sentence

• noun

  He ironed a sharp crease into his work pants before the meeting.

• noun

  She packed clean socks and pants for the weekend trip.

• adjective

  The film was utterly pants and a complete waste of money.

• verb

  The dog pants heavily after chasing the ball across the park.

• noun

  These pants are too long, so the tailor will shorten the legs.

• noun

  He keeps his pants and vests in the top drawer.

Where does pants come from?

Language of origin: Italian

Pants is a shortening of pantaloons, a word that reached English in the late 1600s from the French pantalon and ultimately from the Italian Pantalone, the name of a foolish, skinny old man in the comic theatre tradition known as the commedia dell'arte. That stock character habitually wore tight, long trousers, so his name became attached to the leg-covering garment itself. By the early nineteenth century Americans had clipped the bulky pantaloons down to the brisk, casual pants. The word kept the plural -s because the garment has two legs, the same logic that gives English scissors and glasses. A curious split then opened across the Atlantic: in American and Canadian use pants means the outer trousers, while in British use it came to mean underwear, and later British slang turned it into an adjective meaning rubbish.

How the word is built

• pant (shortened from pantaloon)
• -s (plural marker)