Meaning
In Australian English, bathers is a plural noun meaning a swimming costume, swimsuit, or swimwear; survey evidence shows it is especially common in southern and western parts of Australia.
How it is used
Collins labels bathers Australian and defines the plural noun as a swimming costume. ABC reporting on the Linguistics Roadshow found bathers the most common general swimwear response in its Australian survey, with especially strong use in southern Australia and Western Australia, while swimmers and togs led in other regions.
Examples
- “Pack your bathers for the beach.”
- “She changed into her bathers before swimming.”
- “I left my bathers and towel in the car.”
Pronunciation
/ˈbeɪ.ðəz/ · BAY-thuhz
Tone and register
Casual, ordinary, and unmarked where used. It should not be treated as a single nationwide Australian standard because swimwear vocabulary is a well-documented area of regional variation.
Visitor guidance
Visitors can understand bathers as swimwear. In general English, bathers can also literally mean people who are bathing or swimming, so a possessive or packing/clothing context often signals the Australian garment meaning.
Cultural context
Bathers, swimmers, togs and cossie form a useful regional vocabulary network rather than four redundant spellings. Maperla keeps them separate because Australians genuinely encounter and search for each form, and their distributions differ without clean state borders or perfect speaker predictability.
Places represented
Open the reviewed place guide for each regional sense carried by this canonical entry.