Farthingdale

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A stiff hooped petticoat worn beneath a skirt to make it stand out widely at the hips, fashionable in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
2. An undergarment with a rigid framework of hoops that held a long skirt out flat and wide, popular in Tudor and Jacobean England
3. A structure of cane or whalebone hoops tied at the waist to give a gown a broad, bell-like silhouette in Renaissance fashion

Etymology: A farthingdale was a wide hooped petticoat or hoop skirt worn by English women in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and its name is a blend of two older words. The first part, "farthing," was the name of the smallest English coin, a quarter of a penny. The second part is "verdingale," an earlier term for a hoop framework, borrowed from Spanish "verdugado," meaning "provided with hoops" or related to a green sapling that was bent into a hoop. The English adapted the Spanish word and, over time, reshaped it into "farthingale" by association with the coin. The hoops were often described as wide, flat, and rounded, which is why people compared them to a coin's shape. The form "farthingdale," with the added syllable, is a variant spelling that appears in writing of the period, and it was used alongside "farthingale" without a clear difference in meaning. Both forms are now archaic and survive mainly in discussions of Elizabethan and Jacobean dress.

Synonyms: farthingale, verdingale, vardingale