Meaning & use
denim
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Meanings
noununcountable
A strong, tightly woven cotton cloth, most often blue, used for jeans, jackets and work clothes.
Grammar: Uncountable as a material: a yard of denim. Use pieces of denim, not denims, for the cloth.
Patterns
- made of denim
- a denim jacket
The bag is made of recycled denim.
Darker denim hides stains better than the pale kind.
She sewed a patch of denim over the torn knee.
noununcountable
Clothing made from this cloth, especially a pair of jeans or a whole outfit.
Grammar: Often appears in the plural denims, mainly in British English, meaning jeans.
Patterns
- dressed in denim
He turned up in head-to-toe denim.
The band wore matching denim on stage.
I packed too much denim for a summer trip.
Word forms
| plural | denims |
|---|
Common combinations
- denim jacket
- She wore a denim jacket over her dress.
- faded denim
- His faded denim looked soft from years of washing.
- raw denim
- Raw denim jeans are stiff until you have worn them for months.
- stretch denim
- Stretch denim moves more easily than the older, rigid kind.
- double denim
- Wearing double denim can look stylish if the shades differ.
Synonyms and how they differ
- jeans
- Jeans are the trousers; denim is the cloth they are made from, so the two are not interchangeable.
- twill
- Twill describes a weave with diagonal ribs, and denim is one kind of twill, so twill is the wider term.
- dungarees
- Dungarees are overall-style trousers, historically often of denim, and the word names a garment, not a fabric.
Word family
- denims noun
- jeans or other denim clothing
Commonly confused: denim or jeans?
denim vs jeans
Denim is the material, and jeans are one garment that is made from it.
Practice
Which sentence uses denim correctly?
Choose one answer.
Denim is an uncountable fabric name, so made of denim is natural. It does not take a number, and it is not a verb.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “denim”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.