Word.ws English Dictionary

formalwear

formalwear noun: clothing suited to formal occasions.

Noun

formalwear (uncountable)

  1. Clothing suited to formal occasions
    • With their hair half up, and dressed demurely in black formalwear, they seemed like lost girls and conveyed little beyond a vague sense of urgency and dread; sure technicians all, they are not yet artists able to make their lashing limbs and inscrutable gestures mean something.2007 April 10, Claudia La Rocco, “Austerity Meets Agitation While the Night City Glitters”, in New York Times

Forms of formalwear

alternative formformal wear

Origin of formalwear

From formal + -wear.

Questions about formalwear

What does formalwear mean?
Formalwear means clothing suited to formal occasions.
What part of speech is formalwear?
Formalwear is a noun.

Words near formalwear in the dictionary

  1. formalizes
  2. formalizing
  3. formally
  4. formalness
  5. formals
  6. formalwear
  7. formamidase
  8. formamidases
  9. formamide
  10. formamides
  11. formamidine

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: formalwear (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-formalwear.wav.

Cite this entry: “formalwear.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/formalwear. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.