a pair of trousers

[carol_1]

trousers are referred to as pairs even though there is only one garment.this reference dates back to elizabethan times when hose came as two separate legs which were secured around the waist,giving the appearance of one garment.hence the term a pair of trousers.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Hi, thanks for the comment. It’s requested that people give a link to the specific column that spawned the thread so we can all be on the same page.

The original column is apparently Why do we say a “pair of pants” when there’s only one of them?.

The timing is about right for your etymology.

Online Etymology Dictionary.

trousers
1612, earlier trouzes (1581), extended from trouse (1578), with plural ending typical of things in pairs, from Gaelic or Middle Irish triubhas “close-fitting shorts,” of uncertain origin. The unexplained intrusive second -r- is perhaps by influence of drawers.

And most commentary agrees that the usage stemmed from having separate legs. Cecil is correct only that the pluralness didn’t start with trousers but goes much farther back and that the plural was applied to everything you stuck legs through even if they were never originally in two pieces.

Word Wide Words

I’ve looked at the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, which suggests that the form pair of pants was standard right from its earliest use. Indeed, words for nether garments all seem to have been commonly plural throughout their history, often prefixed by pair of …: breeches, shorts, drawers, panties, tights, knickers (short for knickerbockers), and trousers.

Pants is short for pantaloons, also plural, which in their very earliest incarnations were nearer stage tights; their name comes from a Venetian character in Italian commedia dell’arte who was the butt of the clown’s jokes and who always appeared as a foolish old man wearing pantaloons. Commentators referred to them when they first appeared as being a combination of breeches and stockings. Later the word was applied to fashionable tight-fitting trousers.

Trousers came into the language in the seventeenth century from the Gaelic trowse, a singular word for a slightly different garment rather more like breeches; a later version of it was trews, taken to be a plural because of the final s. Breeches has been plural throughout its recorded history, a long one (it dates from at least the year 1200).