Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
hosier

hosier

1 9.1
A shop or person that sells socks and stockings
  • noun
  • /ˈhoʊziər/
translation icon : medias
  • She bought her favorite pair of hosiery from the new hosier in town.

Examples

  • The local hosier offered a wide range of colorful socks and stockings.

  • Instead, and to save money, hosiers began to produce 'cut ups': cheap stockings made from straight widths that could be produced by apprentices who were paid less than their trained predecessors.

    Academic text (2010)

  • Hey, Van Hosier, whatever your name is, man, we're gonna drop you off in the car wash and get your head waxed.

    Modern Vampires (1998)

  • At the boutique, the hosier was recommending some beautiful hand-knitted tights.

Surface Forms

hosier singular
hosiers plural
hosiery singular

Morphology

hosier = hose (transparent) = hose + ier

Formed from 'hose' with an agentive seller-forming suffix '-ier', so the meaning 'seller of stockings' is directly recoverable.

Etymology

The word hosier comes from the old word hose, meaning 'leg covering' or 'stocking', and you can still see the same root in hosiery. So a hosier was a person who made or sold socks, stockings and other knitted items, which is why today it means a shop or person that sells those goods.