Pants & Chaps

Breeches (bri't'chis) are an item of clothing covering the body from the waist down, with separate coverings for each leg, usually stopping just below the knee, though in some cases reaching to the ankles. more...

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The spelling britches reflects a common pronunciation, and is often used in casual speech to mean trousers or "pants". Breeks is a Scots or northern English spelling and pronunciation.

See also: Trousers and Knickers

Etymology

Breeches is a double plural known since c.1205, from Old English (and before Old French) brēc, the plural of brōc "garment for the legs and trunk," from the Proto-Germanic word *brōkiz, whence also the Old Norse word brók, which shows up in the epithet of the Viking king Ragnar Loðbrók, Ragnar "Hairy-breeches". The Proto-Germanic word also gave rise, via a Celtic language, to the Latin word bracca; the Romans, who did not generally wear pants, referred to Germanic tribes as braccati, "wearers of breeches" (or rather, of fabric wrapped around the legs.)

Like other words for similar garments (e.g., pants, knickers, shorts) the word breeches has been applied to both outer garments and underwear. Breeches is a singular word which uses a plural form to reflect it has two legs. This construction is common in English, but is no longer common in other languages, e.g., the parallel modern Dutch broek.

At first breeches indicated a cloth worn as underwear by both men and women. By the Middle Ages breeches meant "drawers" or "underpants."

In the latter sixteenth century, breeches began to replace hose (while the German Hosen, also a plural, ousted Bruch) as the general English term for men's lower outer garments, a usage that remained standard until knee-length breeches were replaced for everyday wear by long pantaloons or trousers.

Until around the end of the nineteenth century (but later in some places), small boys wore special forms of dresses until they were "breeched", or given adult male styles of clothes, at about the age of six to eight (the age fell slowly to perhaps three). Their clothes were not usually confusable with those of little girls, as the head-covering and hair, chest and collar, and other features were differentiated from female styles.

Types of breeches

The terms breeches or knee-breeches specifically designate the knee-length garments worn by men from the later sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. After that, they survived in England only in very formal wear, such as the livery worn by some servants into the early twentieth century, and the court dress worn by others, such as Queen's Counsel, down to the present day on formal occasions.

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