The article deals with the terms used from the 16th century on to describe dressing and what resulted from it – dresses. It dedicates special attention to how (in)adequate the term noša (costume in the sense of national costume) is for denoting what people wear on their bodies, and in comparison prefers the terms dress and dressing style. Dress is a term used in science as well as in everyday speech, but unlike noša the range of meanings it covers is not limited temporally, socially, or spatially, and the same is true of dressing style, a term which because of its almost exclusively scientifc use has not acquired any additional meanings distorting its original defnition in the part three decades.