Apologies to anyone who may have ventured in here believing that a certain chocolate bar would be discussed or given away, because this post is actually about clothing, and more specifically; underwear! Okay, so now that that’s settled, those with a casual interest in language (and/or lingerie…) are invited to read on. You see, while American English uses the word panties for referring to a certain type of women’s underwear, knickers is instead what is commonly used in British English. However, the word knickers has not always been used about underwear, and being in fact short for knickerbockers there is quite an interesting history to it going back to the gilded year of 1809 and an American word smith named Washington Irving.
In 1809 then, Mr. Irving published a satirical history of New York with the somewhat prolonged title A History of New York From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, and he did so under a pseudonym which was intended to sound unmistakably Dutch; Diedrich Knickerbocker. Because Knickerbocker was used here as a stereotypical Dutch name, eventually Dutch immigrants came to be referred to as Knickerbockers, and the type of pants typically worn by many Dutch immigrants were then also called knickerbockers.
As time passed, knickerbockers came to be used as a general term for seemingly strange types of clothing for a person’s lower body, and subsequently this word was shortened down to knickers. The association remained and for some time the word knickers was used for this purpose (and is still used of course for certain types of pants today), but eventually it came to also be used for women’s underwear. One could obviously give some thought as to exactly why women’s underwear received this association, but it might be safer to skip just that… Anyway, as time passed American English strayed away from British English by taking the word panties (a derivative of pants) rather than knickers, which has since stuck.
Good to know 🙂
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Sources:
1) Forsyth, M., 2015. Gotham City and Ladies’ Underwear. The Inky Fool [online], 2 January 2015.
2) Harper, D., 2015. Knickers. In: Online Etymology Dictionary [online].
3) Harper, D., 2015. Panties. In: Online Etymology Dictionary [online].
4) Wikipedia, 2015. Knickerbockers (clothing). In: Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia [online].
Photo credits:
1) <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/onasill/6176839580/”>Onasill ~ Bill Badzo</a> / <a href=”http://foter.com/”>Foter</a> / <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>CC BY-NC-ND</a>
2) Wikimedia Commons
Language Observer 