codpiece means A part of male dress in the 15th and 16th centuries, worn in front of the breeches to cover the male genitals. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 87 out of 100.
Why this word is great
CODPIECE — [Noun] An external, often exaggerated covering for the male genitals, worn over the front of breeches or hose in 15th- and 16th-century European dress. Its etymology is bluntly anatomical: from Middle English cod ("bag, pouch, scrotum") + piece ("part, portion"). Unlike a trouser fly—a discreet, functional closure for modesty—or an athletic cup—a protective, anonymous shell for safety—the codpiece was an external, declarative, and often absurd proclamation. It manifested as a velvet-swathed bastion straining against a doublet, a steel-plated prow polished to a martial gleam, or a gem-encrusted leathern cartouche—a sculpted monument not to virility, but to the theatrical anxiety from which all fashion springs.
noun
- A part of male dress in the 15th and 16th centuries, worn in front of the breeches to cover the male genitals.“, 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”
- A conspicuous protection for the male genitals in a suit of plate armor.“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 proba”