April 2, 2019
Word Origins: Diaper
The girls and I read the “Princess Diaries” series (a series of children’s books written in diary-form about real life events as known in the lives of historical princesses and female leaders). In there, they discovered the English word for the bits of cloth covering a baby’s bottom is “nappy” or “napkin.”
This made perfect sense as the girls are quite familiar with cloth diapering and the cloth parts of a folded diaper is actually the size and shape of a dinner napkin.
This started some conversation which lead to (always, in my house!) some research. Why do Americans call baby napkins “diapers?”
Well, here’s what we found:
It seems that in the early 1800s people were beginning to commercialize the production of clothing. “Ready-made” as it was called. Cloth was already mass produced. One of the most popular patterns in cheap cotton cloth was a white color with a blocky pattern on it. When cloth napkins were first commercially (by a woman with one sewing machine!) produced, they were made with this pattern of cotton cloth because it was absorbent yet cheap. The pattern’s name? Ready? Diaper.
This was first used to describe a cloth pattern in a Shakespeare play ages before the 1800s.
So using these napkins became known as “diapering” your baby. Early advertisements between rival napkin producers used that term. Hence, within only a few years, the term “diaper” was used as the name of the article covering a baby’s bottom.
By now, over 150 years later, we still refer to napkins as “diapers,” but my children being the way they are, Thea will learn it’s called a “diaper,” “nappy,” “panal,” or whatever word they choose from our myriad of language courses they’re doing. (NO, they didn’t all choose just one!)
Thank you for reading!
Type at you later!
~Nancy Tart