Obviously you know what shampoo is. But have you ever wondered where the word comes from? Luckily you have me to do that for you. So, let’s start with the most important question – does it have anything to do with poo? No, is the slightly disappointing answer (or is it just me who’s disappointed by that…?).
Photo by Dan Smedley on Unsplash.
Shampoo is an Indian word which goes all the way back to 1762. It comes from the Hindi word chāmpo, which is derived from the Sanskrit root chapati (yes, as in the flatbread), which means to press, knead or soothe. The word came over to us dirty Europeans from India by way of one Sake Dean Mahomed, an Indian traveller, surgeon and entrepreneur, who used it to describe a form of massage. In 1814 he and his Irish wife Jane opened the first commercial ‘shampooing’ vapour masseur bath in Brighton (I don’t know what a ‘vapour masseur bath’ is, but it sounds like the sort of thing that would cost several hundred pounds to use in a health spa). He described shampoo in a local paper as ‘…a cure to many diseases and giving full relief when everything fails; particularly Rheumatic and paralytic, gout, stiff joints, old sprains, lame legs, aches and pains in the joints’. At some point after this ‘shampoo’ was used to refer to a scalp massage and then, in the 19th century to the soap used during that massage.