codpiece

plural codpieces · alternative cod-piece

1. historicalA part of male dress in the 15th and 16th centuries, worn in front of the breeches to cover the male genitals.

   Once Francis lifts her hand. She pulls back, half-resisting, and for one moment it seems he intends to lay her little fingers upon his unspeakable codpiece.

   2009, Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall, Fourth Estate, published 2010, page 408

   2 more examples

   , Act III, Scene III, line 130. Borachio: Seest thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is, how giddily ’a turns about all the hot-bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty, sometimes fashioning them like Pharaoh’s soldiers in the reechy painting, sometime like god Bel’s priests in the old church-window, sometime like the shaven Hercules in the smirch’d worm-eaten tapestry, where his codpiece seems as massy as his club?

   [David] Lynch’s film is actually much better than its terrible reputation, but Sting in a codpiece and a Toto soundtrack will never match the potential greatness of [Alejandro] Jodorowsky’s unmade epic.

   2015 July 3, Hari Kunzru, “Dune, 50 years on: how a science fiction novel changed the world”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

2. A conspicuous protection for the male genitals in a suit of plate armor.

   1 more example

   On some suits were screwed large iron cod-pieces; these, according to tradition, were intended to prevent the ill consequences of those violent shocks received in charging, either in battle, or at a tournament. Same say, they were meant to contain sponges for receiving the water of knights, who in the heat of an engagement might not have any more convenient method of discharging it. But most probably, they were rather constructed in conformity to a reigning fashion in the make of the breeches of those times.

   1786, Francis Grose, A Treatise on Ancient Armour and Weapons, page 21