Dictionary of Word Origins

Silk and serge, I thought, were as different as chalk and cheese. Oh yes, they’re both fabrics, materials used in the making of clothes, but that is where the similarity ends. The word silk conjures up images of softness and smoothness, of refinement; silk is the fabric of the wealthy. Serge, on the other hand, is coarse; it’s the material used in the making of clothes for the “common man” – for the worker; it’s the cloth from which denim is derived, the stuff of which jeans are made.

Yet linguistically, serge and silk come from the same source. The words originated in the Far East, in China – in the Chinese word si, which meant silk. The word was brought to Europe along an ancient route that was known as the Silk Road, by the silk traders. The Greeks referred to the Chinese as Seres – that is, the “silk people”. Variations of the word are evident in numerous ancient languages: in sirghe (Manchurian) and sirkek (Mongolian); it is the source of the Latin word sericum, and the Gaelic word siric; in the Russian word shelk and the Lithuanian word shilkai; and more recently, in the French word sarge, the Danish word silke and the English word silk.

The English word serge obviously has clear links with the French word sarge; and sarge, interestingly enough, derived from the Latin expression lana serica – which translates literally as “wool or the Seres” – wool of the Chinese people.

How do I know all this? I’ve been dipping into the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins. The book was first published in 1990 in hardback; this is the first paperback edition. And for wordaholics, this is a welcome reissue.

In its introduction, Ayto writes:

“The average English speaker knows around 50,000 words. That represents an astonishing diversity – nearly 25 times more words than there are individual stars visible to the naked eye in the night sky. And even 50,000 seems insignificant beside the half a million recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. But looked at from an historical perspective, the diversity becomes more apparent than real. Tracing a word’s development back through time shows that in many cases what are now separate lexical items were formerly one and the same word. The deep prehistory of our language has nurtured little word seeds that over the millennia have proliferated into widely differentiated families of vocabulary.”

So we discover that serge and silk are cousins, almost brothers; and denim is a second cousin. How? The fabric which has come to be called denim was simply serge – a coarse material used in the making of working clothes. When gold was discovered in America, the gold rushes ensued; there was a need for strong working pants, and that is where jeans originated. At the time, the French city of Nimes was a major producer of serge, and the Americans imported large quantities of the stuff. Prior to shipping, the bales or serge were stamped : Serge de Nimes which meant serge from Nimes. Over time, this became shorted to “de Nimes”, which eventually became denim.