Breeches ( ) are an article of clothing covering the body from the waist down, with separate coverings for each leg, usually stopping just below the knee, though in some cases reaching to the ankles. Formerly a standard item of Western men's clothing, they had fallen out of use by the mid-19th century in favour of trousers. Modern athletic garments used for English riding and fencing, although called breeches or britches, differ from breeches. Etymology Breeches is a double plural known since c. 1205, from Old English , the plural of "garment for the legs and trunk", from the Indo-European root "break", here apparently used in the sense "divide", "separate", as in Scottish Gaelic ("trousers"), in Breton ("pants"), in Irish ("trousers") and or in Welsh. Cognate with the Proto-Germanic word , plural , itself most likely from the Proto-Indo-European root; whence also the Old Norse word , which shows up in the epithet of the Viking king Ragnar Loðbrók, Ragnar "Hairy-breeches". Like other words for similar garments (e.g., pants, knickers, and shorts) the word breeches has been applied to both outer garments and undergarments. Breeches uses a plural form to reflect it has two legs; the word has no singular form (it is a ). This construction is common in English and Italian (, plural of the never-used ), but is no longer common in some other languages in which it was once common; e.g., the parallel modern . At first breeches indicated a cloth worn as underwear by both men and women. Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, uses the word breech as a synonym or perhaps a euphemism for anus in his letters. In the latter 16th century, breeches began to replace hose (while the German , also a plural, ousted ) as the general English term for men's lower outer garments, a usage that remained standard until knee-length breeches were replaced for everyday wear by long pantaloons or trousers. The difference was that hose were in principle separate garments for each leg, requiring the tunic or a cod-piece to cover the private parts; whereas breeches were sewn together as a single all-enveloping garment. Until around the end of the 19th century (but later in some places), small boys wore special forms of dresses until they were "breeched", or given the adult male styles of clothes, at about the age of 6 to 8 (the age fell slowly