Pants!

Pants, wikipedia usefully informs us, are an item of clothing worn on the lower part of the body, covering each leg separately. If that's not enough information, a helpful illustration is provided:

You'll notice that the colour has been drained from everything except the actual pants, in order to make it clearer just which part of what we're looking at is the pants.


OK, you probably knew all this. You probably also knew that pants is a plurale tantum but you might not have known the term for it - it's something that's always plural like the English words clothes, scissors, entrails, pants, trousers, and feces, the Russian word den'gi [деньги] ("money"), the Swedish word inälvor ("intestines"), or the Dutch word hersenen ("brains").


Pants are first recorded in the 6th century BC, when the Greeks first recorded the existence of horse-riding pant-wearing Persian horse-riders in Iran. The Greeks did not themselves ride horses (possibly because they had no pants) so it must have been a big shock for them. "Holy shit, those Iranians are riding horses and wearing pants!"


So, now I know more about pants, I should go and put some on.