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PlainSpell

codpiece

UK /ˈkɒdˌpiːs/noun

codpiece is a noun meaning “A part of male dress in the 15th and 16th centuries, worn in front of the breeches to cover the male genitals” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled C-O-D-P-I-E-C-E and has 2 syllables, and it appears about once in every 16 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of codpiece is codpieces.

What does codpiece mean?

noun

  1. 1

    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

  2. 2

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

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce codpiece?

  • UK /ˈkɒdˌpiːs/

Codpiece has 2 syllables (counted from the pronunciation).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Wodencafe-codpiece.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of codpiece

  • codpieces plural
  • cod-piece

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is codpiece?

Codpiece appears about once in every 16 million words in written English, the 121,279th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Codpiece in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense part of male dress to cover genitals:

LanguageWords
Frenchbraguette
GermanSchamkapsel
Portuguesebraguilha

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does codpiece come from?

From cod (“bag, pouch, scrotum”) + piece.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).