English has quite a few words for different types of fabric, and many of them have pretty interesting and mysterious origins. Take “corduroy,” for example. It’s a kind of thick cloth with ridges. It’s generally used in colder weather, because it does a pretty good job of insulating. Depending on the sources you use, you might find an oddly circular story about the word’s origin. Probably because of the way it sounds, a common origin story for “corduroy” is that it’s from a French phrase “corde du roi,” or “the king’s cord,” where “cord” is another term for ribbed fabric. The problem with this story is that “cord” is a term for ribbed fabric in English, but not, as far as I can tell, in French. Moreover, in 1807 a French list of French clothing (“Voyage d. Départ. du Midi”) refers (in French, of course) to “kings cordes,” suggesting that the French name is a reference to the English story of the French source. Anyway, nobody really knows where the word “corduroy” came from, but it could also be related to the English family name “Corderoy.”
“Seersucker” is another fabric with a characteristically rough surface. Seersucker is, I’m told, a lighter-weight material than corduroy, and the word first appeared in English in the early 1700s. The June 24, 1725 edition of the Boston News-Letter mentioned “A Seersucker Jacket and Breeches.” At the time seersucker was a fabric made in India, and the word itself comes from version of a Persian phrase rendered an East Indian dialect: “shīr o shakkar” (striped linen garment).
Another fabric word English borrowed from the Southeast Asia is, of all things, the common fabric “gingham.” It’s generally thought (although it’s not settled) that “gingham” comes from the Malay word “ginggang,” which apparently means both a type of cloth and the act of gaping or staring at something. The story goes that early Portuguese explorers borrowed the term, which became “guingao” in Portuguese, around the mid 1500s. It became fairly common in Europe over the following century in accounts of voyages to India and surrounding lands, and was adopted into English in the early 1600s. It appears in the Diary of a Captain Cock (not Captain Cook) in 1615: “…the ginghams, both white and browne..will prove a good commodity in the Kinge of Shashma his cuntry.”
Poplin is a fabric with a slightly ribbed texture, and the word has been used in English since the early 1700s. It’s yet another import, and involves another unusual interplay with French. There’s a town in France called “Poperinge” that was known for textiles back in the day, and one of its products came to be known as “papeline” around the 1600s. “Papeline” entered English as “poplin,” and then not long after (about 1735) was borrowed back into French as “popeline.”
Unlike some other fabrics, “flannel” was originally a product of the British Isles — specifically, it was a well-known product from Wales in the 1500s when the word entered usage. The 1503 “Privy Purse Expenses Elizabeth of York” mentions an expense “For iiij yerdes of fflanell.” While everybody knew where to get some flannel, nobody is quite sure where the word came from. It might be, like the fabric, Welsh. For that to be the case, the original word would be “flannen,” and it would be a derivation of the Welsh word “gwalen”, which means a material made of wool. But there’s also a possibility that “flannel” comes from the Old French word for a blanket: “flaine,” and was introduced to English during the Norman invasion.
If the origins of “flannel” are a bit of a puzzle, “burlap” is even more so. Its first appearance was in the late 1600s (“Course Linnens commonly called Borelapps”), but nobody really knows where the word came from. The best guess is based on the very coarse texture of burlap, which supposedly made it more likely to be used by peasants, and the Dutch word for “peasant” is “boer.” This seems a bit of a stretch, but it’s the only guess of any sort about the origin of “burlap.”
It’s much easier to discover the etymology of fabrics of more recent origin. “Nylon,” for example, was coined by the du Pont chemical company, where the stuff was invented in the late 1930s. It was originally simply known as Fiber 66, which clearly wasn’t going to get much traction in the marketing world. The details, though are readily available in Science and Corporate Strategy, by Hounshell & Smith: “Gladding thought of no-run, which would have caused problems because nylon stockings did run. He then turned it around to nuron but thought that sounded like a nerve tonic. So he changed the R to an L, making it nulon. This apparently was very similar to an existing trademark, and Gladding realized that many advertisements would refer to new nulon, a redundant-sounding phrase. Next, he changed the u to an i and got nilon, which unfortunately has three pronunciations: nillon, neelon, or nylon. The latter one was chosen, and Fiber 66 was given a name.”
In the near future, when the rights to all English words are purchased by multinational corporations, maybe all etymologies will be just as clear cut.
