jeans
- 1A pair of pants made from denim cotton.
He rolled up the cuffs of his jeans before wading into the creek.
Designers showed several new styles of jeans at the spring runway show.
Similardenims
Note
A garment named for a city. Gene, an obsolete English name for Genoa, gave its name to a coarse cotton called Gene fustian, and the cloth later lent its name to the trousers. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, writing in 1873, still set "jeans" off in quotes for homespun cloth, blue or yellow. Like trousers, the word is plural only: say a pair of jeans, and these jeans are faded.
- 2Plural of jean.
The factory produces thousands of jeans each week.
Retailers say wide-leg jeans now outsell skinny ones.
Note
Here the plural belongs to jean the fabric, a word for denim that can be counted or treated as a mass. Counted, it names kinds of the cloth, so a mill can weave several jeans. As a mass noun it takes no s at all, and used before another noun it stays singular, as in a jean jacket. It shares its spelling with the trousers, which never drop the s.
jeans is a form of jean
jean, noun: A sturdy twilled cotton fabric used for hard-wearing garments; denim. Full entry
- Forms
- jeanjeans plural
- Spelling
- jean → jeans: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /z/.
Use it in a sentence
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Origin
From Gene(s) (also spelled Jean(s)), an obsolete English name for the Italian city of Genoa (compare French Gênes). It originally referred to a coarse cotton cloth associated with Genoa, known more fully as Gene(s) fustian. In the 19th century the word came to mean trousers made of such cloth, and the final -s was reinterpreted as a plural ending.