Other forms: collars, collared
A collar is the band at the top of a shirt or coat that folds over around your neck. The stiff points sitting either side of a tie, the flap you turn up against the wind, the button you undo at the end of a long day.
The other collar goes round an animal: a strip of leather with a name tag jingling on it and a lead clipped to the ring. There is a verb too — to collar someone is to catch them and hold them so they cannot slip away, which is what a reporter does outside a courtroom. Work gets described by collars as well: white-collar means office work, blue-collar means work done with your hands. And if someone is hot under the collar, they are angry and flustered, sweating at the neck. You turn a collar up, you loosen it, you grab someone by the collar.
1nouncollarThe band of a shirt, coat or dress that folds over around the neck.~88%
“He loosened his collar and undid the top button.”
synonyms: neckband
2nounwornA band worn round an animal's neck, carrying a tag or a place to clip a lead.~10%
“The dog's collar had a small brass tag with a phone number on it.”
3verbcatchTo catch and stop someone, or corner them so they cannot get away.~2%
“A journalist collared him on the way out of the building.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 21 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
collar is a band worn round the neck.
The collar is named after the neck it sits on. English took it from Old French coler, which came from Latin collāre, from collum, meaning "neck" — the same neck you can still hear in Spanish cuello. Old English had its own word for the neck, heals, and Gothic had hals; the Latin one arrived with the French and stayed.
Proto-Indo-European
*kʷel-
Latin
collāre
Old French
coler
Middle English
coler
English, today
collar
Built from
From Middle English coler, borrowed from Old French coler (Modern French collier), from Latin collāre, from Latin collāris, from collum (“neck”). Cognate with Gothic 𐌷𐌰𐌻𐍃 (“neck”), Old English heals (“neck”). Compare Spanish cuello (“neck”). More at halse. a doublet of collet.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA