Did you ever wonder why trousers are referred to as a “pair” of pants? And for that matter, why is “shirt” singular but “pants” plural? It all goes back a few centuries when, evidently, clothing design and assembly still had a ways to go. At the time each leg of the garment was a separate piece, and the two legs were belted together at the waist. That contraption really was a pair. And even in this latter day of advanced apparel technology, the term “pair” is still used, even though most people don’t know why.
“Pants” (the word, that is, not the garment) comes from a character in Italian comedy theater back in the 1500s. His name was Pantalone, and he was traditionally an old man wearing comically baggy pants. The character name entered English as “pantaloons,” which was a particularly style of pants — very baggy — and eventually it expanded in meaning to mean any sort of trousers, and contracted in length to simply “pants.”
English has a surprising number of words and phrases for pants. For one, I’ve already called them “trousers” a couple of times in the previous paragraphs. “Trouser” showed up in the 1600s, and like “pantaloons”, originally referred to a specific type of leggings. The word comes from the Irish term “triubhas,” meaning “bundle,” and “trouse” (the “-er” came later) were short and tight. They went down to the middle of your thigh, and below that you’d have stockings (in those days men liked to show off their shapely legs — really)! After that style ran its course, “trouse” became used for an outer set of leggings that you’d wear over your pants to stay warm — for example, when you were out riding your horse in the winter. Like “pants,” “trouse” came to mean nearly any sort of legwear, but unlike “pants,” “trouse” got longer when it became “trousers.”
Another synonym for pants is (or was) “breeches,” which might be the oldest of any of them. “Breeches” goes back to the Old English word “brec,” which was “a covering for the trunk and thighs.” If you go back far enough, it probably referred to a “breech cloth.” By the 1200s “breeches” meant pants, but as usual with these terms, it referred to a specific style. “Breeches” were pants that were about knee-length. And also as usual, it wasn’t long before “breeches” meant any old trousers you had. The word morphed into “britches” in many dialects, and by the 1800s, “britches” had became the more common word.
In contrast to “trousers,” “pants,” and “breeches,” the word “slacks” is relatively recent; it didn’t appear until the 1800s. “Slacks” originally meant loose-fitting pants, and “slack” was used in the same sense as you might “take up the slack” in a rope that’s too loose. Even today “slacks” still maintains some association with style; “slacks” still refers to casual pants that are relatively loose.
There have been quite a number of other English words for pants, from “breek” (a variant of “breeches”) to “strosser” (derived from “trouse”) to “brogue,” “kickseys,” “trews,” “rammies,” “kecks,” and the puzzling “stove-pipe” (which was puzzling enough that usage was often “stove-pipe trousers,” which seems like a tacit admission that the term made little sense). Most of these haven’t been used since the 1800s, which seems to have been quite a hotbed for new ways to refer to pants. Or to avoid referring to them — there were also plenty of phrases used to mean pants without actually saying anything like “pants.” Some phrases emphasized what you could do while wearing your pants: “sit-in-‘ems,” “sit-upons,” and “sit-down-upons.” Sometimes main point was the odd situation that (in those days) you needed to refer to something without mentioning it, so what you’d mention would be that you weren’t mentioning anything: “unutterables,” “never-mention-‘ems,” “unimaginables,” and “inexplicables” fall into this weird category. But probably the most apt 19th-century way to say “pants” without actually saying “pants” was to just admit what they were: “indispensables.”
