haberdasher: [14] No one is too sure what Anglo-Norman hapertas meant – perhaps ‘piece of cloth’, perhaps ‘small goods’ – but it is the nearest we can come to the origin of that curious word haberdasher. The theory is that it had an Anglo-Norman derivative, *habertasser or *haberdasser, never actually recorded, which passed into Middle English as haberdassher.
The term seems originally to have denoted a ‘seller of small fancy goods’ – and indeed in the 16th and 17th centuries it was often used synonymously with milliner, which had a similar broad meaning in those days – but gradually it passed into two more specific applications, ‘seller of hats’ (now obsolete in British English, but surviving in the American sense ‘seller of men’s hats, gloves, etc’) and ‘seller of dressmaking accessories’.
haberdasher (n.)
early 14c. (late 13c. as a surname), "seller of small articles of trade" (caps, purses, beads, thread, stationery, etc.), from Anglo-French, where apparently it was an agent noun formation from hapertas "small wares," also a kind of fabric, a word of unknown origin. Sense of "dealer in men's wares" is 1887 in American English, via intermediate sense of "seller of caps." Middle English haberdash (n.) "small articles of trade sold by a haberdasher" appears to be a back-formation from this word, and the verb haberdash is late (1630s) and rare.
实用例句
1. The haberdasher presented a cap, saying, " Here is the cap your worship bespoke. "
