pants

«pants» in Mova's school dictionary: Underwear worn under your clothes around your bottom… — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 1 sentence of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (pants; plural only — a pair of pants)

meaning for a pupil

1) (UK, Ireland, Australia, NZ) Underwear worn under your clothes around your bottom; underpants or knickers. tree →

2) (USA, Canada, also often Australia) Trousers: clothes that cover each leg down to the ankle. tree →

3) (UK, informal) Rubbish, very bad: «That film was pants». tree →

sense in the lessons

In everyday life this word is a famous trap: in the UK «pants» are underwear, but in the USA and Canada they are trousers. In safety lessons the NSPCC «PANTS» rule (UK) teaches that parts of your body covered by underwear are private and you can say no. Phrases: «a pair of pants», «wear the pants» (be the boss), «scared the pants off me».

examples

• I packed clean pants and socks for the trip. tree →
• Put your pants on before your trousers. tree →
• (US) My pants have a hole in the knee. tree →
• (US) He wore khaki pants and a T-shirt. tree →
• Remember the PANTS rule: your private parts belong to you. tree →
• That ghost story scared the pants off me! tree →
• (UK) The weather today is pants. tree →
• "'Pullin' down my pants, Brer Fox,' sezee. tree →

note

Always plural: «My pants are…». Count with «pair»: «two pairs of pants». Big confusion: a British child saying «I spilled juice on my pants» means underwear; an American child means trousers. Shorts are short pants, not underwear.

In the corpora

• I'm gonna be pants girl forever."

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «pants» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.