Other forms: coats, coating, coated
A coat is the long warm thing you put on over everything else before you go outside. It hangs by the door with the keys in one pocket and an old receipt in the other; you shrug it on and the cold stops mattering.
A dog has a coat too - its fur - and a shiny coat is what a healthy animal has. Decorators count in coats: two coats of white on the ceiling, the second one once the first has dried. The verb works the same way, meaning to cover thinly, so strawberries are coated in chocolate and a pan is coated with oil. A coat of arms is the pattern on a family's shield and has nothing to do with getting dressed. One thing learners mix up: a coat is for outdoors, while the thing you wear over a shirt inside is a jacket or a cardigan.
1nouncoatAn outer garment with sleeves, worn over other clothes to keep warm outdoors.~28%
“Put your coat on, it is freezing out there.”
synonyms: overcoat
2nounfurThe fur, hair or wool covering an animal.~42%
“The horse's winter coat came out in handfuls.”
3nounpaintA layer of paint or another substance spread over a surface.~28%
“The door needs a second coat before it will look right.”
4verbcoverTo cover something with a thin layer.~2%
“The apples were coated in caramel and left to set.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 7 of them on a sense (7 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
coat is a piece of outdoor clothing.
Also accepted in games: overcoat
Coat came through Old French cote, 'outer garment with sleeves', from Latin cotta, 'undercoat, tunic'. Latin had itself taken the word from Proto-Germanic *kutto, 'cowl, woollen cloth, coat', which runs back to a Proto-Indo-European word for woollen clothes. So the word left the Germanic world, spent centuries in Latin and French, and came back to English wearing a French spelling.
Middle English
cote
English, today
coat
Built from
From Middle English cote. From Middle English cote, coate, cotte, from Old French cote, cotte (“outer garment with sleeves”), from Latin cotta (“undercoat, tunic”), from Proto-Germanic kuttô, kuttǭ (“cowl, woolen cloth, coat”), from Proto-Indo-European gʷewd-, gud- (“woolen clothes”). Cognate with Old High German kozza, kozzo (“woolen coat”) (German Kotze (“coarse woolen blanket; woolen cape”)), Middle Low German kot (“coat”), Middle Dutch cote (“coat”), Ancient Greek βεῦδος (“woman's attire”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA