Sweatshirt

How to spell sweatshirt

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sweatshirt

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sweatshirt mean?

1. nounA loose, warm cotton pullover, usually long-sleeved and without buttons or a collar.

Sweatshirt in a sentence

• She pulled on a grey sweatshirt before the morning run.

• The gym shop sells a hooded sweatshirt in three colours.

Where does sweatshirt come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern compound of two very old native English words. 'Sweat' descends from the Old English swat, meaning 'perspiration', a noun shared across the Germanic languages and ultimately tied to a root that meant simply 'to sweat'. 'Shirt' comes from the Old English scyrte, meaning a short garment, and it is a close cousin of 'skirt', which entered English from Old Norse and originally described much the same kind of clothing. The combined word is a twentieth-century coinage from American athletics: it named the heavy cotton pullover worn during training to absorb perspiration, and the term spread quickly once the garment became casual everyday wear. The spelling trap is hidden in the first half, because the everyday pronunciation rhymes with 'wet' yet the spelling keeps the older 'ea' cluster of 'sweat', so writers must remember it is sweat plus shirt, not 'swet'.

How the word is built

• sweat (from Old English swat: perspiration)
• shirt (from Old English scyrte: short garment)