Many people will know what a cravat is, even if it is not a particularly common item of apparel these days. The term is usually applied to a broad band of fabric (often rather colourful) which is worn inside the collar of an open-necked shirt. As an item of male clothing, it is generally regarded as being more informal than a necktie.
The actual word cravat, in the sense of “neckcloth” or “neckerchief”, did not appear in the English language until 1656, but we cannot assume that this type of garment was unknown until then in the English-speaking world (which at that time more or less equated to England) because the word neckerchief has existed in English since the 1380s.
The origin of the word necktie is rather obvious – the meaning is clear from its two constituent words. But where did the word cravat come from?
The first source we know of is French. This is hardly a surprise, because hundreds of words have been borrowed by English from French, including very many words for different types of clothing.
Chemise, for instance, was taken directly from French, where the word descended from Latin camisia “linen undergarment”. Denim also comes from French, but via a much more complicated route: it was originally French serge de Nim, “serge from Nismes”, the town now known in French as Nîmes.
However, in Modern French cravate does not correspond in meaning to English cravat, but rather to necktie. The word seems to have arrived in French via Italian, where the contemporary form is cravatta, which once again actually means not “cravat”, but “necktie”. Italian was apparently also the source of Spanish corbata, “necktie”.
So much, then, for the geography of the term. As for the ultimate linguistic origin of the word, a good clue comes from the many reference works which state that the cravat is widely considered to have come into vogue in France in the 17th century in imitation of the linen scarves worn by a particular group of mounted Catholic Balkan mercenaries who came to be known as “the Croats”.
Croat is the name we give to people who are citizens of the traditionally Catholic Republic of Croatia, the western Balkan state which borders on the Adriatic Sea and was formerly part of Yugoslavia. Its major cities currently are Zagreb, Rijeka and the Dalmatian centres of Split and Dubrovnik. The associated ethnic group are mother-tongue speakers of Croatian, a South Slavic language.
These Croat mercenaries were notable for wearing fur hats and long red cloaks as well as wrapping these linen scarves around their necks. French soldiers who came into contact with them were impressed by their uniforms and adopted the scarf for themselves, naming it after the Croats, who were also called Cravats or Crabats. To clinch the connection, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word Cravat is or was “a variant of Croat”.
It helps when trying to work out the etymology of cravat to know that in the Croatian language the word for Croat is Hrvat, and that Croatia is called Hrvatska. Most western European languages do not have words beginning with hr-, and it is a rather natural process for hr- to convert to cr- when such words are transferred from Croatian to English or French.
Dalmatian
Dalmatia is the western coastal region of the Balkan nation of Croatia, formerly part of Yugoslavia. It consists of the strip alongside the Adriatic Sea plus the neighbouring offshore islands, which are very popular with tourists. For English speakers, the word Dalmatian most often conjures up a particular type of spotted dog.
