Other forms: pleats
A pleat is a fold pressed into cloth to give it shape. Knife pleats, a pleated skirt, press the pleats.
It adds fullness where it is wanted and holds the shape where it is not, which is why skirts and kilts use them. A box pleat faces two ways and a knife pleat one. Pressing sets them and washing can undo it. Note plait, which is the same word arriving separately.
1nounpleatA fold pressed into cloth to give it shape.
“She ironed the pleats of her school skirt until every edge was sharp.”
pleat is a fold.
Middle English pleat is a variant of plait, from Old French pleit, from Latin plicare, to fold. Apply and complicated come from the same folding.
Old French
pleit
English, today
pleat
From Middle English -, from a variant of plaitlang?, from Old French pleit. a doublet of plait.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA