the.com/belt
a loop of leather holding up your pants and your whole life's posture
means A strip of leather, fabric, or other material worn around the waist to hold up clothing or carry tools; by extension, a band, a zone, or a hard blow.
from From Old English 'belt,' a strip or girdle, traced back to Proto-Germanic 'baltjaz' — and likely borrowed earlier still from Latin 'balteus,' the sword-belt a Roman soldier slung across his shoulder. So the thing cinching your jeans shares a bloodline with the strap that carried a legionary's blade. The sense of 'a hard hit' (to belt someone) and 'a region' (the Bible Belt, an asteroid belt) are both English extensions — the idea of a band that wraps or strikes.
- black belt
- originally just a white belt stained by years of training
- asteroid belt
- so empty spacecraft fly through without dodging anything
- conveyor belt
- car assembly time dropped from 12 hours to 90 minutes
- seatbelt
- its inventor gave up the patent to save lives
- belt up
- British slang meaning shut up, unrelated to clothing
asteroid belt — region between mars and jupiter containing millions of rocky objects
van allen belt — zones of energetic charged particles around earth discovered in 1958
rust belt — industrial region of midwest us including ohio, pennsylvania, michigan
bible belt — region of southern united states with high evangelical protestant concentration