The English word napkin is a diminutive formation from Middle English nappe (tablecloth) combined with the suffix -kin, borrowed from Middle Dutch -kijn, meaning little. A napkin is thus, etymologically, a little tablecloth — a small piece of cloth associated with the dining table.
The word nappe itself entered English from Old French nappe (tablecloth), which derives from Latin mappa, meaning a napkin, cloth, or towel. The Latin mappa is one of a small number of Latin words identified by ancient authorities as borrowings from Punic, the language of Carthage. The Roman scholar Quintilian, writing in the 1st century CE, explicitly noted that mappa was not a native Latin word. Punic was a variety of Phoenician
The Latin mappa had several meanings in Roman usage. Its primary sense was a cloth or napkin used at table. It was also used for the cloth dropped by a presiding magistrate to signal the start of chariot races in the circus — the mappa was the ancient equivalent of the starting flag. From this signaling function, mappa extended to any cloth used as a marker or indicator
The Old French form nappe shows a common phonological development: Latin initial m- became n- in some French words. This shift, though not universally accepted as regular, is well attested in the history of nappe/mappa. Modern French nappe retains the meaning of tablecloth and is also used in geology and hydrology for a nappe (a sheet of water flowing over a dam, or a sheet of rock thrust over another).
The Middle English diminutive suffix -kin was borrowed from Dutch and Flemish, where -kijn (modern Dutch -je) was the standard diminutive. It was productive in Middle English, forming words like lambkin (little lamb), firkin (little cask, from Dutch vierdekijn, a quarter-cask), and mannikin (little man). The suffix is no longer productive in modern English, but it survives in established words like napkin, bumpkin, and gherkin.
The word napkin has different applications in British and American English that occasionally cause confusion. In American English, napkin is the standard word for the cloth or paper used at meals. In British English, napkin can also refer to a baby's diaper (called a nappy in informal British usage — itself a clipping of napkin). The British use of serviette (from French) as an alternative to napkin for the dining implement carries class connotations in British English: serviette was traditionally considered a lower-middle-class or non-U usage, while napkin was U (upper
The parallel history of napkin and apron is worth noting. The English word apron derives from Old French naperon (a large cloth, augmentative of nappe), but the initial n was lost through misdivision: a naperon became an apron, a process linguists call false splitting or juncture loss. The reverse occurred with some other words: an ewt became a newt, and an ekename became a nickname. Napkin and apron thus share the same