Diving suit
garment or device designed to protect a diver from the underwater environment
A diving suit is a garment or device designed to protect a diver from the underwater environment. A diving suit may also incorporate a breathing gas supply (such as for a standard diving dress or atmospheric diving suit), but in most cases the term applies only to the environmental protective covering worn by the diver. The breathing gas supply is usually referred to separately. There is no generic term for the combination of suit and breathing apparatus alone. It is generally referred to as diving equipment or dive gear along with any other equipment necessary for the dive.
Diving suits can be divided into two classes: "soft" or ambient pressure diving suits – examples are wetsuits, dry suits, semi-dry suits and dive skins – and "hard" or atmospheric pressure diving suits, armored suits that keep the diver at atmospheric pressure at any depth within the operating range of the suit. Hot water suits are actively heated wetsuits.
Function
The diving suit is worn as a form of protection from the diving environment. This has several aspects, the importance of which may vary depending on the specific environment of the dive. Atmospheric diving suits primarily isolate the diver from the ambient pressure, and all the complications it brings as consequences of breathing gas under pressure.
“Diving suit” enters the record as garment or device designed to protect a diver from the underwater environment. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Diving, suit and garment can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q13450335. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Diving suit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.