Cardigan

How to spell cardigan

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cardigan

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cardigan mean?

1. nounA knitted jacket or sweater that fastens up the front, usually with buttons or a zip.

Cardigan in a sentence

• She pulled a grey cardigan over her blouse before the meeting.

• The office was cold, so he kept a wool cardigan on the back of his chair.

Where does cardigan come from?

Language of origin: Celtic

This word is an eponym, meaning it comes straight from a person's name. It honours James Thomas Brudenell, the seventh Earl of Cardigan, a British army officer best remembered for leading the doomed Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War in 1854. Officers of that period wore a knitted woollen waistcoat that buttoned up the front, and the style became associated with the earl, so the open-fronted knitted jacket took his title as its name from around the 1860s. The earl's title in turn came from Cardigan, a town and former county in west Wales, whose own name derives from the Welsh Ceredigion, meaning the land of Ceredig, an early ruler. Because the word is a proper name rather than a built-up Latin or Greek term, its spelling has no helpful root logic; you simply learn it as the place and the man, with the soft second g that the spelling preserves.

How the word is built

• cardigan (from the title Earl of Cardigan, a Welsh place name)
• no affixes; treated as a simple eponymous noun