(n.) A loose outer garment, extending from the neck downwards, and commonly without sleeves. It is longer than a cape, and is worn both by men and by women.
(n.) That which conceals; a disguise or pretext; an excuse; a fair pretense; a mask; a cover.
(v. t.) To cover with, or as with, a cloak; hence, to hide or conceal.
Example Sentences:
(1) But when people's jobs, homes and businesses are in jeopardy, it is not enough for the prime minister and the chancellor to use the eurozone crisis as a cloak to hide their lack of action.
(2) Winston Churchill, when he was offered the role of minister of the local government board in 1906, commented: "There is no place more laborious, more anxious, more thankless, more cloaked with petty and even squalid detail, more full of hopeless and insoluble difficulties."
(3) I can't pull an invisibility cloak over my house – nor would I wish to," she said, a little wistfully, as if she really wished she had Harry Potter's magic powers.
(4) Wearing royal blue cloaks with pointed hoods, the boys line up beside the road in a small village just outside the city of Ségou, chanting in unison.
(5) The most promising addition is the under-construction National Museum of African American History and Culture, designed by the British architect David Adjaye and scheduled to open in 2015, which cloaks a modernist structure with shimmering bronze-coated decorative panels.
(6) Brennan's testimony theoretically represents a rare chance to learn more about drone killing, warrantless wiretapping, torture, rendition, foreign meddling and other odd cloak-and-daggery.
(7) "The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy.
(8) We, and the public, cannot meaningfully evaluate execution protocol cloaked in secrecy.
(9) There's the odd scene where he's scrambling around naked, but it's cloaked in a more intelligent context.
(10) I will put prices up if I suddenly want a velvet cloak or a bejewelled cock ring.
(11) Images of her being dragged and stomped on - her black abaya cloak torn open to reveal her naked torso and blue bra - became a rallying symbol for the revolution and undermined the interim military rulers who held power between Mubarak's fall and Morsi's rise.
(12) His small frame could be seen following the tree line until eventually it was swallowed by the dense forest cloaking the border.
(13) The hypothesis is advanced that while the Hawaiian Islands contain one of the world's largest percentages of endemic species in the flora, only a few of these species were used for illnesses, though many endemic species were used for building, tapa making, and the foundation of the elaborate and renowned feather cloaks.
(14) However the value of training at altitude for competition at sea level appears on the one hand to lack total acceptance amongst sports scientists; and on the other to hold some cloak of mystery for coaches who have yet to enjoy first hand experience.
(15) It’s like bike sharers are given a cloak of visibility when they set out on a journey.
(16) The pair, whose identities have not been revealed, were dressed in white robes and bowed their heads as they were whipped by officials wearing brown cloaks and masks with eye slits.
(17) We acknowledge the complexity and elegance of the theoretical substance and program algorithms of existing work in these disciplines, while simultaneously observing that many presentations of this material cloak the essential facts and concepts in unnecessary jargon and hyperbole.
(18) No mention of UK Muslim women who are unhappy with this antisocial black cloak.
(19) Ermine cloaks the coalition's first post-local election test on Wednesday.
(20) Those sentiments had been echoed in the seemingly very different context of Qom, the centre of Shia religious studies, where most women move about in full-length black cloaks – the chadors that are the ultimate expression of Shia modesty.
Petticoat
Definition:
(n.) A loose under-garment worn by women, and covering the body below the waist.
Example Sentences:
(1) Saturday’s can-can dancers – with their petticoats in team colours – were a novelty but it is Toulon’s can-do attitude towards recruitment that is taking them – regardless of the tournament they play in – to places others cannot reach.
(2) This week’s Champions League semi-finals did not have the gravitas of 1792’s famous “Petticoat Coat” duel between Lady Almeria Braddock and Mrs Elphinstone, but the stakes were high all the same.
(3) They included an elaborate military jacket, embroidered kimonos and a "petticoat cage" (a hooped underskirt normally worn under crinolines).
(4) Come here for secondhand cartoon sweaters, neon petticoats and pink roller skates or a T-shirt with a cracked silk screen of 1980s-era Madonna.
(5) Hadow puts it more chivalrously: "I see the Arctic as a maiden newly discovered on the social scene, and we're melting away her petticoats, and there are some avaricious types peering underneath, and someone needs to defend her honour."
(6) The other woman we were sneakily reading in 1963 was Simone de Beauvoir, but the childhoods of little-girl colonials such as ourselves lacked starched petticoats and were not very French.
(7) Their clothes are the rewards of immaculate girlhood: dresses of taffeta and velvet with lace collars, petticoats, ankle straps, pocketbooks and initialled handkerchiefs, seasonal gloves of cotton and kid, matching coats and muffs.
(8) A Conservative MP has criticised the "night of the petticoats" reshuffle that brought several new women into the cabinet last week.
(9) Some of them dealt with Cambridge, Paris and Switzerland, while those on his upbringing were not only delightful but almost intolerably poignant to anyone of his generation: rationing, London fogs, trolleybuses, the local Sainsbury's which still had sawdust on its floor and "assistants in starched blue-and-white aprons", not to mention the way that "girls in those days came buttressed in an impenetrable Maginot Line of hooks, belts, girdles, nylons, roll-ons, suspenders, slips and petticoats".
(10) "Keira was lovely to act with, but there were something like 73 layers of petticoat to get through.
(11) Rachel Simpson, blogger at Pretty Petticoats and second-year fashion retail management student at Birmingham City University I've never attended any of the shows, but I go down to Somerset House during London Fashion Week to get inspiration from what everyone is wearing.
(12) At other times she used her Lady Bracknell manner to get past KGB officers; when she went to Zimbabwe she adopted the air of a slightly senile elderly tourist and in El Salvador she made a white flag to fly on the car out of an M&S petticoat.
(13) A pink petticoat in the forecourt distinguishes this two-storey heap of rubble from other more intact buildings nearby.
(14) For reasons which may or may not be connected to voluminous frilly petticoats, the most attractive period is often the Victorian age.
(15) Each shop – Secret Dog, Garter, Ilil, Hayatochiri and Southpole - is owned by young enthusiastic designers who toil away making one-off pieces like petticoats and blouses made from wire mesh, or a pair of Nike Air Force 1 trainers nailed to traditional wooden sandal blocks and spray-painted pink.