Other forms: tailored, tailoring, tailors
A tailor is the person who makes clothes to your own measurements, and who takes in and lets out the ones you already own. A tape measure round the neck, chalk marks on a sleeve, a mouthful of pins while the hem gets turned up.
Tailors work mostly in men's clothing; a dressmaker does dresses, and a seamstress sews rather than cuts and fits. The verb has left the shop altogether: to tailor something is to shape it to fit one person or purpose, and it takes TO — a course tailored to beginners, a speech tailored to the room. Tailored describes clothes with a sharp, fitted cut, and tailor-made means made for one person and nobody else, or perfectly suited: the job was tailor-made for her. Watch the ending — it is tailor, not tailer.
1nountailorA person whose job is making, altering and fitting clothes to a customer's measurements.
“The tailor pinned the sleeve and told him to come back on Thursday.”
synonyms: dressmaker, outfitter
2verbchangeTo change something so that it suits a particular person, group or purpose.
“The training is tailored to the level of each student.”
3verbclothingTo make clothing to someone's measurements.
“The coat was tailored for him in a back room in Naples.”
tailor is a maker of clothes.
Tailor came through Middle English taillour from Anglo-Norman and Old French tailleor, from a verb meaning to cut, and behind that Latin tālea, 'a cutting'. So the tailor is named for the scissors rather than the needle — the cutting out, not the sewing up. German made the same choice with Schneider, and so did Polish krawiec: every language seems to name the trade after the blade.
Middle English
taillour
English, today
tailor
From Middle English taillour. Middle English taillour, from Anglo-Norman taillour, from Old French tailleor, from taillier, from Latin tāliō, from Latin tālea (“a cutting”). a doublet of tailleur. Compare typologically Schneider (akin to snithe); кројач, krawiec (akin to krojiti).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA