![]() ![]() All the dictionaries I've found say that the primary stress in chaperon(e) falls on the first syllable, but some transcribe secondary stress on the third, and all seem to agree that it has an unreduced vowel (the Oxford English Dictionary gives the following three pronunciations: /ˈʃapərɒn/ /ˈʃapərɔːn/ /ˈʃapərəʊn/). For most of these words, it seems to be connected to the stress or vowel quality of the last syllable. An "extra" e also occurs in some words taken from other languages such as German ( chorale, ketone). There are other words from French that don't refer to female people, but have definitely have gained an e, such as morale, locale, ladrone (the last one seems to be also taken from Spanish ladrón). If this is the actual origin of the spelling, I guess it would make it doubly erroneous now, since in modern usage the word is often gender-neutral.īut it's not clear that the e was intended to be a feminine termination. Spell it chaperone, apparently under the supposition that it requires Surprisingly to me, the Oxford English dictionary treats "chaperone" as merely a common error for "chaperon", not even listing it alongside the other variant spellings such as chapperoon, shaparoon, shaparowne. (I excluded the spoken sections.) So there are clearly some differences across time and space, but chaperon is actually older or more British or both it's definitely not a new American simplified spelling. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) has 277 instances of chaperone and 60 instances of chaperon from 1990 to 2015. The BYU-BNC British National Corpus has 32 instances of chaperon and 32 of chaperone from the 1980s to 1993. when used metaphorically means that the experienced married woman shelters the youthful débutante as a hood shelters the face”.The corpora I checked indicate that both forms are used on both sides of the Atlantic. About a century later the word began to be used figuratively for a married or elderly woman protecting a young woman - a chaperone, as we now spell it. The hoods went out of fashion in the fifteenth century and liripipe became a semi-fossil word, most commonly used today by historians of fashion and the occasional academic institution.īy the seventeenth century, the chaperon had become an item of female costume exclusively. As well as longer, it also grew more ornamental as time passed. Over time, liripipes became steadily longer, sometimes down to the ankles this was hardly practical, so the liripipe was often wound around the head to keep it out of the way. Later on, liripipes became part of everyday wear on a hood called a chaperon, a word that is closely related to the modern French chapeau. Hoods like these were at first worn by academics as part of their formal dress indeed a few universities still use the word liripipe for their graduates’ ceremonial sashes. What we do know is that the English word (on occasion appearing as liripoop, for reasons that are entirely obscure) was used for a dangling extension to the point of a medieval hood. ![]() ![]() This suggests strongly that nobody has the slightest idea what it really meant. Nobody seems to know much about the origin of this word, except that it comes from medieval Latin liripipium, variously explained down the centuries as the tippet of a hood, a cord, a shoe-lace and the inner sole-leather of shoes. ![]()
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