A stocking (also known as hose, especially in a historical context) is a close-fitting, variously elastic garment covering the foot and lower part of the leg. Stockings vary in color, design and transparency. By analogy, the term is also used to describe a type of horse marking in which the white coloring extends from the horse's hoof to just above the knee.

Today, stockings are primarily worn by women for fashion and aesthetics, usually in association with mid-length skirts. They can also be worn for increased warmth. They are also sometimes worn by men, and in cross-dressing and fetishism.

Historically, even though the word sock is at least as ancient in origin, what men normally wore were often referred to as stockings, probably especially when referring to longer hose at times when they were the fashion for men. The word stock used to refer to the bottom "stump" part of the body, and by analogy the word was used to refer to the one-piece covering of the lower trunk and limbs of the 15th century—essentially tights consisting of the upper-stocks (later to be worn separately as knee breeches) and nether-stocks (later to be worn separately as stockings). (See Hose.)

Ann Curry (born November 19, 1956) is an American television news journalist, photojournalist, and co-anchor on NBC's morning television program Today. She is the former news anchor on Today, a role she began in March 1997, and was the host of Dateline NBC from 2005–2011.

Curry is a Board Member at the International Women's Media Foundation.

Curry was born in Guam to Bob Curry, of Cherokee, French, German, Scottish and Irish descent from Pueblo, Colorado, and Hiroe Nagase, originally from Japan. Her American father, a career Navy man, met her mother during the U.S. occupation of Japan following the Second World War. The U.S. military initially did not allow the marriage, but her father returned to Japan two years later to marry Nagase.

Curry lived in Japan for several years as a child, attending the Ernest J. King School on the military base in Sasebo. Later she moved to Ashland, Oregon, where she graduated from Ashland High School. She graduated with a BA in Journalism from the University of Oregon in 1978.