Word.ws English Dictionary

prêt-à-porter

prêt-à-porter adjective: ready-to-wear.

Adjective

prêt-à-porter (not comparable)

  1. Ready-to-wear.
    • gloves, scarves, jewellery, and prêt-à-porter clothes; belts, beads, flowers, scent ... all the fleeting frivolities and lovely ephemera of the passing mode are strewn about as though by some demented diseuse gone berserk with her travelling trunk of properties.1957, Francis Cowley Burnand, Henry Mayhew, Mark Lemon, Owen Seaman, Shirley Brooks, Tom Taylor (editors), Punch, volume 232, page 136

Origin of prêt-à-porter

First use appears c. 1957 in Punch. See cite below. Reborrowed from French prêt-à-porter (1951), itself a calque of English ready-to-wear.

Questions about prêt-à-porter

What does prêt-à-porter mean?
Prêt-à-porter means ready-to-wear.
What part of speech is prêt-à-porter?
Prêt-à-porter is an adjective.

Words near prêt-à-porter in the dictionary

  1. précised
  2. précises
  3. précising
  4. Prévost
  5. Prévostian
  6. prêt-à-porter
  7. Príncipe
  8. Prācrits
  9. Prākrit
  10. Prăjeni
  11. ps

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: prêt-à-porter (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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Cite this entry: “prêt-à-porter.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pr%C3%AAt-%C3%A0-porter. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.