habiliment

• abiliment (obsolete)

From Middle English habilement, from Old French habillement (“clothes”).

• (US) IPA^(key): /həˈbɪlɪmənt/

habiliment (plural habiliments)

1. Clothes, especially clothing appropriate for someone's job, status, or to an occasion.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto XII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 5:

     Forth came that auncient Lord and aged Queene, / Arayd in antique robes downe to the ground, / And sad habiliments right well beseene; / A noble crew about them waited round / Of sage and sober Peres, all gravely gownd; / Whom farre before did march a goodly band / Of tall young men,° all hable armes to sownd, / But now they laurell braunches bore in hand; / Glad signe of victorie and peace in all their land.

   • c. 1606–1607 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Anthonie and Cleopatra”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene vi]:

     She / In th' habiliments of the goddess Isis / That day appeared, and oft before gave audience […]

   • 1838 March – 1839 October, Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1839, →OCLC:

     […] Mrs Crummles was then occupied in exchanging the habiliments of a melodramatic empress for the ordinary attire of matrons in the nineteenth century.

   • 1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter XXIV, in The History of Pendennis. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850, →OCLC:

     Her maid having a taste in dressmaking—to which art she had been an apprentice at Paris, before she entered into Miss Blanche’s service there—was kept from morning till night altering and remodelling Miss Amory’s habiliments; and rose very early and went to bed very late, in obedience to the untiring caprices of her little taskmistress.

   • 1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter LII, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC:

     Bananas with their great ragged leaves, like the tattered habiliments of an empress in adversity, grew close up to the house.

2. Equipment or furnishings characteristic of a place or being; trappings.