Shorts

How to spell shorts

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shorts

What does shorts mean?

1. nounA garment covering the lower body and reaching part way down the thighs, worn in warm weather or for sport.

Shorts in a sentence

• He packed two pairs of shorts for the beach holiday.

• The runners wore lightweight shorts for the summer race.

Where does shorts come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word goes back to the Old English sceort, meaning 'brief' or 'not long', which described both time and physical length and is related to the same Germanic root that gave English 'shirt' and 'skirt' (both originally meaning a cut or shortened garment). By the 1800s 'short' was used informally to describe trousers cut off at or above the knee, and the plural 'shorts' settled in as the name for the garment itself, following the same logic that gives us 'trousers', 'pants', and 'jeans' as plurals for a single two-legged item. The word entered American use for sporting and casual wear in the nineteenth century and spread worldwide in the twentieth. The spelling is straightforward and phonetic; the only thing to remember is that, like 'scissors' or 'trousers', it is normally written and treated as a plural.

How the word is built

• short (Old English sceort: brief, not long)
• -s (plural noun marker)