dress
Definitions
General English
- noun a piece of clothing usually worn by women or girls, covering the body and part or all of the legs
- verb to put clothes on someone
- verb to clean an injury and cover it with a bandage
Agriculture
- verb to clean or prepare the carcass of something such as a chicken so that it is ready for cooking and eating
Cars & Driving
- verb to give (a rough surface, flanges, etc.) the right shape by grinding or a similar process
Electronics
- The arrangement of the connecting wires in a circuit so as to minimize or prevent undesired coupling and feedback.
Media Studies
- noun the clothes that a person wears and the way in which they visually present themselves, an important factor in non-verbal communication
Medical
- verb to clean a wound and put a covering over it
Military
- verb to correct the alignment of soldiers on parade
Travel
- noun a piece of woman’s or girl’s clothing, covering more or less the whole body
- noun special clothes
- verb to put on clothes, especially formal clothes
Origin & History of “dress”
Dress originally meant literally ‘put right, put straight’. It comes via Old French dresser from vulgar Latin *dīrectiāre, a derivative of Latin dīrectus ‘straight’ (from which English gets direct). Traces of this underlying sense survive in the word’s application to the correct aligning of columns of troops, but its main modern signification, ‘clothe’, comes via a more generalized line of semantic development ‘prepare’ (as in ‘dress a turkey for the oven’), and hence ‘array, equip’. (English address developed in parallel with dress, and comes from the same ultimate source.) Dresser ‘sideboard’ (15th c.) was borrowed from Old French dresseur, a derivative of dresser in the sense ‘prepare’.
