clothes

Clothes /kləʊðz/ are things you wear, such as shirts, trousers, dresses, and coats.

There is no singular form of clothes. In formal English, you can talk about a garment, a piece of clothing, or an article of clothing, but in ordinary conversation, you usually name the piece of clothing you are talking about.

Clothing /'kləʊðɪŋ/ is the clothes people wear. You often use clothing to talk about particular types of clothes, for example winter clothing or warm clothing. Clothing is an uncountable noun. Don't talk about 'clothings' or 'a clothing'.

Clothing serves many purposes: it can serve as protection from the elements [the weather, especially bad weather], rough surfaces, rash-causing plants, insect bites, splinters, thorns and prickles by providing a barrier between the skin and the environment. Clothes can insulate against cold or hot conditions, and they can provide a hygienic barrier, keeping infectious and toxic materials away from the body. Clothing also provides protection from ultraviolet radiation.

A splinter is a very thin, sharp piece of wood, glass, or other hard substance, which has broken off from a larger piece. Spines are derived from leaf tissue and thorns from stem tissue. Prickles come from neither; they are simply corky projections from a plant's skin, or dermal tissue. 它们是来自植物皮肤或真皮组织的软木状突起。

Wearing clothes is also a social norm, and being deprived of clothing in front of others may be embarrassing. In most parts of the world, not wearing clothes in public so that genitals, breasts or buttocks are visible could be considered indecent exposure.

Scientists are still debating when people started wearing clothes. Estimates by various experts have ranged from 40,000 to 3 million years ago. Some more recent studies involving the evolution of body lice [虱子louse的复数。mouse的复数是mice] have implied a more recent development with some indicating a development of around 170,000 years ago and others indicating as little as 40,000. No single estimate is widely accepted.

Some human cultures, such as the various peoples of the Arctic Circle, traditionally make their clothing entirely of prepared and decorated furs and skins. Other cultures supplemented or replaced leather and skins with cloth: woven, knitted, or twined from various animal and vegetable fibers including wool, linen, cotton, silk, hemp [大麻], and ramie [苎zhù麻].

Although modern consumers may take the production of clothing for granted, making fabric by hand is a tedious and labor-intensive process involving fiber making, spinning, and weaving. The textile industry was the first to be mechanized – with the powered loom – during the Industrial Revolution.

Different cultures have evolved various ways of creating clothes out of cloth. One approach simply involves draping the cloth. Many people wore, and still wear, garments consisting of rectangles of cloth wrapped to fit – for example, the dhoti for men and the sari for women in the Indian subcontinent, the Scottish kilt and the Javanese [爪哇] sarong. The clothes may simply be tied up (dhoti and sari); or pins or belts hold the garments in place (kilt and sarong). The cloth remains uncut, and people of various sizes can wear the garment.

Another approach involves measuring, cutting, and sewing the cloth by hand or with a sewing machine. Clothing can be cut from a sewing pattern and adjusted by a tailor to the wearer's measurements. An adjustable sewing mannequin or dress form is used to create form-fitting clothing. If the fabric is expensive, the tailor tries to use every bit of the cloth rectangle in constructing the clothing; perhaps cutting triangular pieces from one corner of the cloth, and adding them elsewhere as gussets [插接于衣服中的布块].

In the thousands of years that humans have been making clothing, they have created an astonishing array of styles, many of which have been reconstructed from surviving garments, photos, paintings, mosaics, etc., as well as from written descriptions.

Cloth /klɔθ/ is fabric such as wool or cotton that is used for making such things as clothes.

A cloth is a piece of fabric used for cleaning or dusting. The plural form of cloth is cloths, not 'clothes'.

Clothe is a verb.

Examples:

• I took off all my clothes.
• Wear protective clothing.
• Some locals offered food and clothing to the refugees.
• I cut up strips of cotton cloth.
• The women wove cloth for a living.
• Clean with a soft cloth dipped in warm soapy water.
• Don't leave damp cloths in a cupboard.
• They could barely keep the family fed and clothed.

六级/考研单词: clothe, trousers, singular, garment, converse, seldom, noun, insect, thorn, insulate, sanitation, infect, toxic, radiate, spine, derive, tissue, stem, norm, deprive, embarrass, breast, expertise, million, evolve, implicit, fur, supplement, weave, knit, vegetation, fibre, wool, linen, cotton, silk, consume, tedious, spin, textile, mechanize, loom, revolve, wrap, pin, sew, tailor, expense, construct, triangle, astonish, array, plural, verb, dip, damp, bare