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mitten

UK/ˈmɪtən/US/ˈmɪtən/
nounA2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,917 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: mittens

A mitten is a hand covering with one space for all four fingers and a separate one for the thumb. Warmer than a glove, and far clumsier.

The warmth comes from the fingers sharing heat, which is why mittens beat gloves in real cold and why they are what children are given. The trade-off is that you cannot do anything while wearing them. The word gave English mitt as a shortening. A pair joined by a string through the coat sleeves is one of the enduring images of a British childhood.

Thorguds · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of mitten

  1. 1nounmittenA hand covering with one compartment for the fingers and one for the thumb.A2+

    “She pulled off a mitten to find the key.”

Where it comes from

  1. Old French

    mitaine

  2. Middle English

    myteyne

  3. English, today

    mitten

Built from

  • miste · Old French — playful name for cat
  • mitti · Old High German — midpoint
  • *midją · Proto-Germanic — middle, center

From Middle English myteyne, from Old French mitaine (Modern French mitaine), of unclear origin; possibly from mite, miste (“playful name for cat”) + -aine. Alternatively, mitaine may be from Old High German mittamo (“half”), superlative of mitti (“midpoint”), from Proto-Germanic midjô, midją (“middle, center”), from Proto-Indo-European médʰyos (“between, in the middle, center”). Compare Catalan mitana, Medieval Latin mitta, mitana, and Occitan mitana.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Clothes & Fashion, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 37 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

mitten in the wild

  • A mitten is a type of glove that covers the hand but does not have separate finger openings or sheaths.

    Mitten

  • Generally, mittens still separate the thumb from the other four fingers.

    Mitten

  • Eriocheir sinensis, the Chinese mitten crab or Shanghai hairy crab, is a medium-sized burrowing crab named for its furry claws, which resemble mittens.

    Chinese mitten crab

  • When viewed from the south, the buttes appear to be two giant mittens with their thumbs facing inwards.

    West and East Mitten Buttes

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.