coat

A coat is typically an outer garment for the upper body, worn by either gender for warmth or fashion. Coats typically have long sleeves and are open down the front, and closing by means of buttons, zippers, hook-and-loop fasteners, toggles, a belt, or a combination of some of these. Other possible features include collars, shoulder straps, and hoods. Etymology Coat is one of the earliest clothing category words in English, attested as far back as the early Middle Ages. (See also Clothing terminology.) The Oxford English Dictionary traces coat in its modern meaning to , when it was written cote or cotte. The word coat stems from Old French and then Latin cottus. It originates from the Proto-Indo-European word for woolen clothes. An early use of coat in English is coat of mail (chainmail), a tunic-like garment of metal rings, usually knee- or mid-calf length. History The origins of the Western-style coat can be traced to the sleeved, close-fitted and front-fastened coats worn by the nomads of the Central Asian steppes in the eleventh century, though this style of coat may be much older, having been found with four-thousand-year-old Tarim mummies. The medieval and renaissance coat (generally spelled cote or cotte by costume historians) is a mid-length, sleeved outer garment worn by both men and women, fitted to the waist and buttoned up the front, with a full skirt in its essentials, not unlike the modern coat.