Definition
nounA set of clothes to be worn together, now especially a man's matching jacket and trousers (also business suit or lounge suit), or a similar outfit for a woman.
nounA garment or set of garments suitable and/or required for a given task or activity: space suit, boiler suit, protective suit, swimsuit.
Sentence Examples
Your shoes do not go with the suit.
Your tie blends well with your suit.
She was wearing a grey business suit.
Word Origin & History
From Middle English sute, borrowed from Anglo-Norman suite and Old French sieute, siute (modern suite), originally a participle adjective from Vulgar Latin *sequita (for secūta), from Latin sequi (“to follow”), because the component garments "follow each other", i.e. are worn together. See also the doublet suite. Cognate with Italian seguire and Spanish seguir. Related to sue and segue.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"A canister of flour from the kitchen had been thrown at the looking-glass and lay like trampled snow over the remains of a decent blue suit with the lining ripped out which lay on top of the ruin of a plastic wardrobe."
— 1963, Margery Allingham, “Foreword”, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC:
"Think of banking today and the image is of grey-suited men in towering skyscrapers. Its future, however, is being shaped in converted warehouses and funky offices in San Francisco, New York and London, where bright young things in jeans and T-shirts huddle around laptops, sipping lattes or munching on free food."
— 2013 August 3, “Revenge of the nerds”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847:
"You had an army / Of suits behind you"
— 1996, Ani DiFranco, “Napoleon”, in Dilate:
"Two smartly dressed suits walked up to the doctor. "Are you alright Dr. La Perouse?""
— 2016, A.K. Brown, Jumpstart (Champagne Universe Series: Book 1), page 29:
"Suits didn't wear suits any more—they wore Tibetan prayer beads coiled around their wrists. But they slithered in a suitlike way."
— 2020, Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde, New York: Deluge Books, →ISBN: