garb

plural garbs

1. countableuncountableFashion, style of dressing oneself up.First known use late 16ᵗʰc.
2. countableuncountableA type of dress or clothing.First known use early 17ᵗʰc.

   This new-comer was a man who in any company would have seemed striking.[…]Indeed, all his features were in large mold, like the man himself, as though he had come from a day when skin garments made the proper garb of men.

   1910, Emerson Hough, chapter I, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC

3. countablefigurativelyuncountableA guise, external appearance.

   You thought, because he could not speak English in the native garb, he could not therefore handle an English cudgel.

   1599 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Life of Henry the Fift”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act V, scene i]

present singular third person garbs · participle present garbing · participle past garbed · past garbed

1. transitiveTo dress in garb.

   Synonyms: habit, habilitate

plural garbs

1. governmentA wheatsheaf.
2. A measure of arrows in the Middle Ages.

   Yorkshire supplied 500 bows, and 580 garbs of arrows, 360 of which had iron heads pointed with steel.

   1957, H. R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry, page 118