Culottes are trousers, usually for women, that stop around the knee and are cut so full that from a little way off they can look like a skirt. Fashion still uses the word for a wide, skirt-like trouser, sometimes longer than the knee. Though actually, the French word first named men’s knee-breeches — the kind eighteenth-century men wore, fastening below the knee. In the French Revolution, working men who did not wear those fancy breeches were called sans-culottes (“without culottes”). So the magazine sense (women’s skirt-trousers) is real, but it is a later use. In ordinary English now, culottes almost always means the women’s garment. And in everyday French today, culotte often means women’s underwear — a trap if you take the English fashion word to Paris. In English the word stays in clothes talk; it is not everyday vocabulary for most students.

褲裙（看來像裙子的褲子，多半到膝；台灣服飾店就叫「褲裙」。）