COSTUME • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Costume

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/kɑstˈum/ /kˈɑstum/ Listen

noun

Costume n.

Dress in general; esp., the distinctive style of dress of a people, class, or period.

Such an arrangement of accessories, as in a picture, statue, poem, or play, as is appropriate to the time, place, or other circumstances represented or described. "I began last night to read Walter Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel...I was extremely delighted with the poetical beauty of some parts...The costume, too, is admirable."

A character dress, used at fancy balls or for dramatic purposes.

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Etymology of 'Costume'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Costume" Quotes from Famous Books

... "It is now quite another thing;—they are all changed. You have not seen them in their state dresses;—this makes an amazing difference. The new habit of the Directory is so charmingly fancied, that it is impossible not to fall in love with so well-dressed a Constitution;—the costume of the sans-culotte Constitution of 1793 was absolutely insufferable. The Committee for Foreign Affairs were such slovens, and stunk so abominably, that no muscadin ambassador of the smallest degree of delicacy of nerves could come within ten yards of them; but now they are so powdered, and ...

— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... brightly, "all that can be remedied; you are a beautiful girl, there is no denying that, and I shall see that you have a dinner dress to set off your beauty and a smart little tailored costume to wear in the carriage, and when you see yourself in it you will remember who gave it you. I expect your underwear is no better than your ...

— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot

... wing. Of your dramas I have little room, and less skill, to speak. "Antony," they tell me, was "the greatest literary event of its time," was a restoration of the stage. "While Victor Hugo needs the cast-off clothes of history, the wardrobe and costume, the sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost of Barbarossa, the coffins of Lucretia Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no more than a room in an inn, where people meet in riding cloaks, to move the soul with the last degree of terror and ...

— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... whose legs were bent, and his body in a limp, helpless state, which called forth all the strength of the others to keep him from subsiding in a heap upon the snow. He seemed to be young, heavily bearded, and, as far as his costume could be seen in the yellow glare, he wore high boots and a pea-jacket; while his companions, one of whom was a keen-faced man, with clean-shaved face and a dark moustache, the other rather French-looking from his shortly cropped beard, ...

— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn

... had required only a slight "letting out" to make it "do," and taken in conjunction with the flaming red dress, made a study in color that would have delighted the heart of a Gros Ventre squaw. Thick, home-knit stockings, and a pair of stiff cow-hide shoes completed the costume, and made Microby Dandeline the center of an admiring semi-circle ...

— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx

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