domestics
- 1Plural of domestic.
The estate's domestics were given a half-day off for the holiday.
She managed the household's domestics with a firm but fair hand.
Note
The plural belongs only to the noun uses of domestic. One is household servants. The other, in colloquial speech, is domestic disputes, so context decides whether a household's domestics are people or quarrels. The adjective (domestic flights, domestic animals) never takes an -s. The same spelling also names the dated word for home-made goods, which has no singular at all.
- 2Goods made within a country rather than imported, especially home-made cotton cloths.
The dry-goods store advertised sturdy domestics at half the price of foreign cloth.
Frontier households relied on plain domestics for everyday shirts and aprons.
Similarhomespun
Oppositeimports
Note
Only the plural exists here: there is no "a domestic" meaning a single length of home-made cotton. The word now sounds dated, so it suits historical writing and period description better than modern retail talk, where "domestic goods" or "home-produced" is the plain choice. It leans on the adjective's sense of "within one country," not on the household one.
domestics is a form of domestic
domestic, noun: An argument or fight, sometimes violent, between members of the same household. Full entry
- Forms
- domesticdomestics plural
- Spelling
- domestic → domestics: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /s/.
Use it in a sentence
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