![]() Another style, especially designed for driving, has its shoulders extended by supporters quite three inches deyond the normal line, while the coat trails softly in sacque fashion all around the figure. The following passage is from an article on women’s fashion in the New Orleans Daily Picayune of 8 February 1899:Īn extremely stylish effect noticed upon many of the cloth suits was a trace buckle of silver, finished with a strap of the material. And we see the phrase duck tape by the end of the nineteenth century, although the earliest uses refer to non-adhesive strips of cloth. Over time, duck became a standard term in English for a type of cotton cloth. Gutting and spruce canvas drillings pack, duck hinderlands, middle good headlock, Muscovy linnen, narrow, Hamburgh cloth, narrow, and Irish cloth, the C. Duck appears in a 1640 table of import duties, referring to cloth imported from the Continent (the hinderlands): The fact that the term only appears in the Dutch half of the dictionaries indicates the term was generally unfamiliar to English speakers when Hexham wrote his lexicons.īut the word did have some limited currency in English before Hexham published his dictionary. The next year, Hexham published the complete English-Dutch/Dutch-English edition, which has these entries in the Dutch-English half:ĭoeck, ofte doeck-laken, Linnen, or linnen cloath. Here is the one for linnen:įine linnen, Fijn lijnwaet, ofte fijn lijnwaet-doeck The 1647 one only translates English to Dutch and uses doeck in several entries. The word appears in two Dutch-English dictionaries written by Henry Hexham in 16. Or the duck could refer to the cotton cloth backing to which adhesive was originally applied.ĭuck is a term that was likely borrowed from the seventeenth-century Dutch doeck, meaning cloth. There are claims that the name comes from its waterproof capabilities, but this would appear to be an after-the-fact explanation, ginned up to explain the term. ![]() It is most likely an alteration of duct, with the / t / phoneme being dropped. The duct in duct tape clearly refers to its application in sealing heating and air-conditioning ductwork, but the origin of duck tape is uncertain. Both are perfectly good terms, so use whichever you prefer, but which term was first used to describe the adhesive tape is uncertain duct tape is attested a few years earlier, but the use of duck tape to refer to non-adhesive tape is significantly older and may have also had earlier unattested use for the adhesive variety. ![]() The dictionary underneath Microsoft Word declares duck tape to be an error and suggests duct tape as a replacement, but you don’t have to submit to the tyranny of the software giant. People often debate whether or not the adhesive cloth tape should be called duct tape or duck tape. (This is a substantially updated and corrected version of the posting of 28 September.)
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