Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, offers useful tips to copy editors and anyone else who prizes clear and orderly writing. Here she tackles the question of how plural pants got transformed into singular pant.
A reader named Sabine wrote, "When did a pair of pants become a pant? And shorts are now a short. Really?"
Sabine said she'd noticed the singular use (add trouser to the phenomenon, as well) in catalogs only recently, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary (the online version), pant in the singular is more than a hundred years old. The OED cites an 1893 book called Some Peculiarities of Speech in Mississippi by one Hubert Anthony Shands, and the citation is a lexicographer's dream in that it's a written comment from an observer of language, to whom the use seems new: "Pant.., an abbreviation of pantaloons, used by clerks in dry-goods stores. They say: 'I have a pant that I can sell you,' etc. Of course, pants is a well-known abbreviation, but I think pant is rather a new word."
The next citation, from 1962, is from an L. L. Bean catalog: "A practical and well made pant for general sportswear." A 1991 citation from an advertisement has "jogging pant." The singular use clearly has not gained currency beyond catalog copy, but it does seem to thrive there. The OED etymology bears this out: "In current sense chiefly used in the retail clothing industry." However, the earliest citation (1832) and one other citation are for the use of pant to mean "pantleg."
The word pantleg is formed according to a regular pattern in which the singular form of a noun is used when it is acting attributively. Feed for chickens is chicken feed, not "chickens feed," and the leg of a pair of pants is a pantleg, not a "pants leg." Other compounds using pant listed by the OED are pantcoat, pantdress, pantskirt, and pantsuit. Some of the citations show variants: pant-skirt, pant coat. (The variant spelling pants suit listed by some dictionaries reflects a different phenomenon: the inexplicably widespread use of a spelling that bears no relationship to actual pronunciation and bucks the logical pattern of English.)
All of these attributive uses refer to a style of garment rather than to a specific garment, and I think this is the use that catalogs employ. L. L. Bean's description of a "well-made pant" was referring to the general product being produced for sale, as opposed to a particular pair of pants. The general concept is associated with the singular use; the particular, with the plural. Any tweaking of the copy seems, to my ear, to cause more problems than it solves. For instance, saying "a practical and well-made pair of pants for general sportswear" would seem to be a misuse of synecdoche: you want the general term to represent the particular here, rather than the other way around. But "These are practical and well-made pants for general sportswear" lacks punch.
Nothing's as awkward as a pantdress, though. Any of you women readers who, like me, had the misfortune to wear one for that brief time when they were popular will know exactly why the style did not turn out to have legs.
Wendalyn Nichols is the editor of the Copyediting newsletter and a commissioning editor of dictionaries for Cambridge University Press. She began as a freelance researcher, writer, and editor, then became a lexicographer and editor with the Longman Group. For four years she was the editorial director of Random House Reference and Information Publishing. She lives in New York, New York with her husband and young daughter. Follow her on Twitter @WendalynNichols and @Copyediting.
