Bikini

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /bɪˈkiː.ni/

Definitions

1. A two-piece swimsuit consisting of a top and bottom garment worn for swimming or sunbathing
2. A style of swimwear made up of two pieces, including a top and bottom, commonly designed for activities like swimming or sunbathing
3. A form of swimwear that features two separate pieces, typically a top and a bottom, which is primarily used for aquatic activities or sun exposure

Etymology: Four days after the United States set off an atomic bomb over a lagoon in the Pacific, a Parisian engineer named Louis Réard presented a swimsuit made of little more than a few triangles of cloth and named it after that lagoon. The date was 5 July 1946, and the suit was so scanty that his model, Micheline Bernardini, was a dancer at the Casino de Paris. Respectable models would not wear it. The lagoon belonged to a ring of coral islands in the Marshall Islands, and its name had already passed through two empires. The islanders called it "Pikinni", a name usually explained, probably correctly, as "pik", surface or plane, plus "ni", coconut: the coconut place, or surface of coconuts. When the Marshalls became part of German New Guinea, German colonial maps wrote the name as Bikini, and that spelling stuck. During the Second World War, in 1944, the atoll came under American control. Its people were later moved off to other islands, and in July 1946 the first tests of Operation Crossroads made its name famous across the world. Réard's choice followed within days, and the reasoning usually given is that his suit would cause as much excitement as a nuclear bomb. Whether he meant precisely that, or simply grabbed the most famous place name of the moment, is debated. But the atomic theme was already in the air. Earlier that summer the designer Jacques Heim had launched his own small two-piece under the name "Atome", and in 1946 and 1947 the press happily described the new swimsuit in the language of explosions and fallout. English had taken the French word by June 1948, and by then it already meant any skimpy two-piece swimsuit, not just Réard's design. The bomb soon faded from the word. A Pacific place name had become a piece of fashion, and before long people began to hear something entirely new in its first syllable: the Latin prefix "bi-", meaning two, as in bicycle and binary, which seemed to suit a garment in two pieces. In 1964 that misreading produced the monokini, a one-piece version without a top. Two pieces became one, all because a word usually explained as meaning "coconut place" in Marshallese was treated as though it had been counting.

Synonyms: swimwear, two-piece, bathing suit