Today's Word "Kerchief"
Published in Vocabulary
kerchief /KEHR/chif/ (noun) - A woman's head covering, a scarf worn on the head.
"Karen always wore a kerchief to cover the frayed spots on her antique wigs, or to serve as an impromptu shopping bag in a pinch."
Middle English "coverchef," then "curchef" from the Anglo-Norman variant of Old French couvrechef "a cover-head," a compound from couvrir "to cover" + chef "head." French couvrir comes from Latin cooperire "cover completely" from co "with" + operire "cover." The French word for "head," chef, originates in Latin caput "head" after the loss of the [t]. The same word lies at the base of "chapter," "capital," and the Italian word for "head," capo. "Mischief" originates in an Old French word, meschever "to end badly," that resulted from the prefix mis- "wrong, bad" added to the Vulgar Latin verb capare "to come to a head." Our word "chief" comes from the same source but so does "head." In Old English it was "heafod," with the normal Germanic change of [k] to [h] and [p] to [f].
Comments