Underwear

How to spell underwear

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce underwear

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does underwear mean?

1. nounClothing worn next to the skin beneath outer garments.

Underwear in a sentence

• She packed a week of clean underwear for the trip.

• The laundry basket was full of socks and underwear.

Where does underwear come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound built from two ancient native English elements. The first part, 'under', comes from Old English 'under', meaning 'beneath' or 'below', a word shared across the Germanic languages. The second part, 'wear', comes from the Old English verb 'werian', meaning 'to clothe oneself' or 'to carry on the body', which by extension came to name the clothing itself, as in 'footwear' and 'menswear'. The combined noun 'underwear' is relatively modern, appearing in English in the nineteenth century to describe garments worn directly against the skin beneath the outer clothes. Because both pieces are everyday words spelled exactly as they sound, the only mild trap is remembering it is written as one solid word rather than two; the 'wear' ending also distinguishes it from the unrelated 'ware' meaning goods or pottery.

How the word is built

• under- (beneath)
• wear (clothing worn, from Old English werian 'to clothe')