Other forms: costumes
A costume is a set of clothes that turns you into somebody else — a pirate, a nurse, a giant banana. The bin bag and the gold paint you wear for one night in October.
Actors and dancers wear costumes, the person who designs them is a costume designer, and a costume drama is a film set in the past, all bonnets and breeches. Costume also means the ordinary dress of a place or a period: traditional costume, national costume, which is nobody's disguise. Costume jewellery is cheap jewellery made to look expensive, glass standing in for stones. British English calls a one-piece swimsuit a swimming costume, or a cossie. The stress goes on the front, KOS-tume, and the word is not the same as custom — though underneath, the two are one word.
1nouncostumeClothes worn to look like someone or something else.~37%
“His costume was a bedsheet with two holes cut in it.”
synonyms: outfit
2nounactorsThe clothes worn by actors or dancers in a performance.~58%
“The costumes took longer to make than the whole set.”
3nountraditionalThe traditional dress of a country, region, or period.~5%
“The dancers wore the national costume of their village.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
costume is clothing.
Also accepted in games: outfit
Costume and custom are the same Latin word arriving by different roads. Latin consuetudo meant custom or habit; Italian costume held on to that meaning, French passed the word to English, and English narrowed it to clothes — because what people wear is one of a place's habits. That is why national costume still carries the older sense: not a disguise, but what was customary.
French
costume
English, today
costume
Borrowed from French costume. French costume, from Italian costume, from Latin consuetudo (“custom, habit”). a doublet of consuetude and custom and kastom. Verb circa 1802, perhaps modelled on French costumer.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA