I was watching something American with babies in it the other day (possibly ‘This Is Us’?) and the word ‘diaper’ came up. Which started me thinking about why we (and a lot of other English-speaking countries) have nappies, and Americans have diapers. They’re not even close to being the same word. And while there are obviously lots of differences between British and American English, there aren’t that many words that I can think of where we say one thing and they say something completely different (obviously there are exceptions – many of them food-related (zucchini, egg-plant, scallions, etc.) – feel free to put me right in the comments with others).
A Chinese snuff bottle (1700–1800) showing three types of diaper background.
Because it’s American I assumed ‘diaper’ was fairly modern. Wrong. Check this out from The Taming of the Shrew by Billy Shakespeare:
‘Let one attend him with a silver basin
Full of rose-water and bestrew'd with flowers,
Another bear the ewer, the third a diaper,
And say 'Will't please your lordship cool your hands?’
So, it turns out ‘diaper’ is actually a really old word from Middle English (which was spoken from the Norman Conquest in 1066 until the late 15th century). At this point it was a term for a pattern of repeated squares, rectangles or lozenges on fabric, but also on brickwork or paving, and other architectural type-stuff. The word comes from the Greek ‘dia’ for ‘cross’ (as in ‘diamond’ or ‘diagonal’) and ‘aspros’, Greek for ‘white’. So why did a piece of fabric used to wrap up a baby’s bum come to be called a diaper? Well, the first cloth nappies were cut into geometric shapes (as that made them easy to wrap round the bub) – hence, ‘diaper’.
When we colonised North America, the settlers took the word ‘diaper’ with them, where it remained. ‘Nappy’ is actually a much more modern word – it didn’t turn up until the 1920s – and is probably a shortened version of ‘napkin’. Although you wouldn’t want to wipe your face on one.