not seeing/hearing the obvious

[darkoshi]

While reading someone's profile, I realized for possibly the first time that the German word for a sweater, "Pullover", is based on the English words "pull over". I may not have ever thought about the word in that way before. It was just a German word to me, sort of like "palaver" is a just an English word if you don't know its etymology.

I'm also not sure I've heard it used as a word like that in English before (which helps explain why I didn't make the connection), even though wiktionary lists it as English.

.

Updated to add:
I just remembered this too: Germans often use a short form of the word, Pulli.

Comments

[conuly]

I've certainly heard it before in English, if that datapoint helps.

[darkoshi]

Is it a very common word in English, or more dialectal?
If it's common, then surely I've heard it too. But after all this sudden thinking about the German word, I am no longer sure of what I knew in English 2 hours ago.

[conuly]

Well, it's always hard to know if the word you think is familiar really is familiar to everybody or just the people you know, but I've seen it in print from authors from all over the anglosphere.

[darkoshi]

That's true.

I checked ngrams now:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=pullover%2Csweater%2Csweatshirt%2Cblazer&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

It's less common than "blazer" (which I'm familiar with but never enough to remember what one is) but doesn't seem to be obscure. I probably have seen it used in English before.

Hmm. That reminds me now, of... of... video of guy and cat?... ooh what was that video... which also used some clothing term I was only slightly familiar with... jumper! A jumper as in a sweater.

[frith]

Rinse and repeat for French: pull and pullover.

[darkoshi]

Interesting! The Wiktionary page lists it for Italian, I know it's used in German, and now French. So I wonder how widespread the word is in other languages, and what popularized it. I'd have thought many languages would have their own more entrenched words for "a warm shirt". Surely it can't have been such a novelty to have a knit shirt that is put on by pulling it over the head? (Or maybe it was!)

Here's a good thread about jumpers, pullovers, sweaters, jerseys and guernsey/ganseys (that term is new to me):
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27568/whats-the-difference-between-a-jumper-a-pullover-and-a-sweater