Did You Know?

In medieval French, a diminutive form of nape, meaning “tablecloth,” was naperon, which referred to a small cloth that is placed over a more elegant tablecloth to protect it from stains. This word appears in English of the 14th century as napron and also denoted a protective cloth, but one that was placed over clothing rather than on a table. Because in speech it is often difficult to tell where word boundaries fall, a napron was incorrectly understood to be an apron. The new form apron effectively replaced napron by the 17th century, which completely obscured the etymological relation of apron to napkin, the name of another protective cloth.