The habitual habiliments of nuns are habits. “Habit”, meaning the uniform of a Catholic nun, is not related to the word “habiliment” (which means clothing), even though it sounds like it might be. Instead, a nun’s “habit” is short for “habitual” because they wear the same outfit all the time. You might wonder why the outfits word in other occupations aren’t also called “habits”. That’s a good question; why aren’t uniforms called “habits” any more? At one time it wasn’t unusual to refer to a customary uniform of any sort as a “habit”, whether it was worn by a nun, a soldier, or an official in some capacity that was signified by a uniform.
“Habiliments”, on the other hand, are any softs of clothes at all. The word comes from the French verb “habiller”, which means to make something ready to use. Without the leading “h”, it resembles the English word “able”, and in fact that’s where “able” comes from as well.
“Habiliments” didn’t originally mean just any old clothes; it was reserved for soldiers. It’s used in that sense in Shakespeare, where Richard II says:
“Marshal, ask yonder knight in arms,
Both who he is and why he cometh hither
Thus plated in habiliments of war.”
By the 1800s “habiliments” no longer meant a soldier’s armor and weapons. Its meaning had shifted to any set of garments connected with an occupation or occasion. That’s how it’s used in Maria Monk’s “Awful Disclosures”, published in 1836:
“Madame Lavalliere afterward admitted, that Maria Monk did arrive at her house at the time specified, in the usual habiliments of a Nun, and made herself known as an eloped Nun.”
So although I pointed out that “habit” is not associated with “habiliments”, there was a time when “habiliments” meant what we mean today by a Nun’s habit. Nowadays “habiliments” is pretty rare, but you still encounter it occasionally. The Glasgow Herald published this in 2014:
“You know the kind of cyclist I mean: all is vanity. … He wears wicked shades, and insect-head helmet, and has athletic signage on his inappropriate habiliments.”
That cyclist probably gets decked out like that every time, which makes (or would once have made) his outfit a “habit”. It shows, after all, how able a biker he is.
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