Transcript for the Piece Audio version of apron- word of the day

This is the etymology moment, and I'm Charles Hodgson. Today we'll hear the story behind the word apron.
It might not seem that an apron that people might wear when cooking should be related to a map that they might use when driving, but the two words are indeed related. An apron is pronounced just like that, "an apron." But historically at least, this is a mistake. The original way to say it was "a napron." 700 years ago napron appeared in English from Old French so that would be 100 or 150 years after William the Conqueror took over England, imported a whole slew of new noblemen and got all the ambitious Englishmen speaking French. But just like today where people hear song lyrics incorrectly, people hundreds of years ago heard a napron incorrectly so that by the 1460's we have citations for both words, napron and apron appearing. Before an apron was a napron in Old French it had been a nappe in Latin which was a cloth or a table-cloth. In Britain today a nappy is a diaper but it doesn't take its name from Latin; at least not directly. Nappy is short for napkin. It seems that it wasn?t just the English who were mispronouncing words because in Latin we have not only nappe but mappa as well, both being the same word and both evidently relating not only to tablecloths, but sometimes to maps, as mappa would suggest. The idea being that maps were not things printed off by the thousands, but hand crafted strategic documents; painted or drawn on cloth for durability and portability. When map first appeared in English however, it appeared as the much longer word mappamonde, which if you know that monde means world you might think means "map of the world." Except at the time map didn't mean "map," it meant "cloth," so that mappamonde meant more figuratively "table-cloth depicting the world."