trews
/truːz
/- She also sells pointed boots, tight black trews, crinolines, and hooped corsets (which use steel rather than whalebone) along with jewellery and accessories hinting at pagan and alternative sub-cultures
- His usual high leather boots and baggy pleated trews had got soaked and muddy yesterday, he explained, and now they were drying off by the stove at home.
- The three Lowland infantry regiments, whose members have traditionally worn tartan trews for centuries, will be forced to wear kilts when the government's planned new Scottish ‘super-regiment’ is formed next year.
- I intend that the Hunting Stewart tartan trews worn by the Royal Scots will become standard mess dress for all the ship's officers.
Origin
Mid 16th century: from Irish triús, Scottish Gaelic triubhas (singular); compare with trousers.
trousers from early 17th century:
Scottish Highlanders and Irishmen once wore a trouse or trouses, a kind of knee-length shorts whose name came from Irish triús or Scottish Gaelic triubhas. The same words gave us trews (mid 16th century), once similar to the trouse but now close-fitting tartan trousers as worn by some Scottish regiments. In the early 17th century people started calling the trouse trousers, on the analogy of drawers (probably from their being things that you pull or draw on). Until the end of the 18th century men in Europe wore tight breeches—looser trousers were adopted by the working classes during the French Revolution, and the style imported to Britain by dandies like Beau Brummell. The dominant member of a married couple wears the trousers now, and has done since the 1930s, but long before that the phrase was wear the breeches, recorded from the 16th century. See also pants, tweezers