/krəˈvæt/·noun·c. 1656, in English travel and fashion writing; Samuel Pepys records it in his diary by 1665·Established
Origin
Cravat derives from French cravate, a 1650s rendering of Hrvat — the Croatian word for a Croat — after Croatian cavalry mercenaries wore distinctive knotted linen neckwear in the Thirty Years' War, making this everyday English word a preserved fossil of a 17th-century military encounter.
Definition
A wide neckcloth of folded or pleated fabric worn loosely around the neck and tucked into or pinned at the shirt opening, named after the distinctive linen scarves worn by 17th-century Croatian cavalry.
The Full Story
French17th centurywell-attested
The word 'cravat' entered English via French 'cravate', borrowed in the 1650s–1660s as a fashionable term for a neckcloth worn by Croatian mercenary soldiersserving in the French army during the Thirty Years' War. These soldiers, called 'Croates' or 'Cravates' in French (a corruption of 'Hrvat', the Croatian endonym), wore linen or muslin cloths tied loosely around the neck as part of their military dress. French fashionobservers and court society adopted
Did you know?
The cravat is the only common Englishword that encodes the name of the Croatian people — not through 'Croatia' (which arrived via a separate Latinate route) but through a direct French transcription of 'Hrvat.' Croatia's ownname for itself, Hrvatska, and the English word for a piece of neckwear are etymologically the same word, separated by three centuries of fashion history.
it in his diary by 1665. The Croatian endonym 'Hrvat' descends from a Slavic form *Xrŭvatŭ, of debated deeper origin — one hypothesis connects it to an Old Iranian *xarwat- meaning 'those who guard', possibly reflecting early Slavic-Iranian contact. No PIE root is recoverable with certainty for 'cravat' itself. The semantic trajectory is ethnonymic: a people's name became a garment name because that people wore it distinctively — alongside 'denim' (from Nîmes), 'jeans' (from Genoa), and 'suede' (from Sweden). Key roots: *Xrŭvatŭ (Proto-Slavic: "the Croatian people; ultimate source of the garment name via French ethnonym"), Hrvat (Croatian: "a Croat; the national self-designation that French transformed into cravate").