Diaper

How to spell diaper

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce diaper

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does diaper mean?

1. nounAn absorbent garment worn by a baby or incontinent person to catch waste.

Diaper in a sentence

• The new parents packed a fresh diaper in the changing bag.

• The supermarket had run out of the larger diaper size.

Where does diaper come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word travels back to the Byzantine Greek diaspros, which combined dia, meaning 'thoroughly' or 'across', with aspros, meaning 'white'; together it described a costly cloth shot through with white, often woven into a small repeating pattern. Medieval Latin took it up as diasprum, and Old French reshaped it into diapre or diaspre, naming a rich figured fabric. English borrowed the word in the 1300s, where it first referred to a linen woven with a small diamond-shaped repeating design rather than to anything worn by babies. Because that absorbent patterned linen was cut up and used to wrap infants, the cloth's name gradually shifted to the garment itself, a sense that took firm hold in North America. The surprising point for spelling is that the second syllable is an unstressed schwa, so writers must remember the 'a' in the middle even though the ear barely registers it.

How the word is built

• dia- (Greek: thoroughly/across)
• asp(ros) (Greek: white)
• -er (English noun ending)