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OneKitly

underwear

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈʌndəwɛə//
  • United States//ˈʌndɚˌwɛɹ//
  • United States//ˈʌndɚwɚ//

Clothes worn next to the skin, underneath outer clothing.

noun

  1. 1

    Clothes worn next to the skin, underneath outer clothing.

    Don't scratch and bite, my little bear, you'll soon need bigger underwear.

    As a couple of soldiers sing a dirty song, he loses sight of the edge of the stage and falls off in the middle of his dance like a seasoned slapstick artist, his white legs in the air and his filthy underwear visible to all.

  2. 2

    Underpants (boxers, briefs, panties, etc) and often bras.

    “A thong,” she answered him breathlessly. Now completely turned on by the fact that his man was sniffing her underwear and grinning like a tiger that took down its prey. That is if tigers could smile and still look sexy.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₁én Proto-Indo-European *h₁entér Proto-Indo-European *(H)n̥dʰí Proto-Indo-European *-ér Proto-Indo-European *(H)n̥dʰér Proto-Germanic *under Proto-West Germanic *undar Old English under- Middle English under- English under- Proto-Indo-European *wes- Proto-Indo-European *-yeti Proto-Indo-European *-éyeti Proto-Indo-European *woséyeti Proto-Germanic *wazjaną Proto-West Germanic *waʀjan Old English werian Middle English weren English wear English -wear English underwear From under- + -wear. Compare Dutch ondergoed, German Unterwäsche, Swedish underkläder.

Forms

plural
underwears
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).