suiting

Pluralsuitings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   Cloth woven specifically for tailoring into suits, jackets, and similar garments.

   The tailor draped the charcoal suiting over the mannequin to check how it fell.

   Fine suiting holds a crease well and resists wrinkling through a long day.

   Note

   A trade word that works in two ways. As a mass noun it means the cloth itself (a length of charcoal suiting). In the plural it names kinds or lines of cloth, the way a mill lists what it makes. Charles and Alice Mary Hadfield's The Cotswolds: A New Study (1973) pairs men's suitings with ladies' costumings in exactly this catalog sense. So suitings means varieties of fabric, not separate pieces of it.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of suit.

   Suiting his speech to the young crowd, the mayor kept it short and funny.

   Country living is suiting them more than they ever expected.

   Note

   A participle that also leads a noun life of its own. As a verb it forms the progressive with be (the arrangement is suiting everyone). As a gerund it can head a phrase like the suiting of policy to circumstance, which keeps the old sense of adapting one thing to another. Where it means corresponding, it is followed by to, while with survives only in archaic prose. The same spelling also names the cloth for suits.

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