A mannequin is a life-sized model of a human body used to display clothing in stores. Walk past any clothing shop window and you'll see mannequins wearing the latest fashions, standing perfectly still in their carefully chosen outfits. Store employees dress these figures in new styles to show customers how clothes might look when worn.

Department stores have used them for over a century to showcase everything from winter coats to swimsuits. Some mannequins are incredibly realistic, with painted faces and styled wigs, while others are deliberately abstract: just a smooth, featureless form that lets the clothing take center stage.

Artists also use smaller mannequins as drawing aids, positioning their jointed wooden limbs to study how bodies move and bend. Medical students practice techniques on specialized mannequins designed to simulate real patients. The crash test dummies that engineers use to test car safety are technically mannequins too, though people rarely call them that.

The plural is mannequins.