The word pyjamas (spelled pajamas in American English) entered English around 1800, borrowed from Hindustani payjama, which itself comes from Persian pay-jama, a compound of pay meaning leg or foot and jama meaning garment or clothing. The literal meaning is leg garment or leg clothing. The original payjama was a pair of loose, lightweight trousers tied at the waist with a drawstring, worn throughout South Asia and the Persian-speaking world as everyday lower-body attire.
The Persian element pay (leg, foot) descends from Old Persian pada-, which traces to PIE *pods, the root meaning foot that generated one of the most widely distributed word families in Indo-European. From this single root come English foot (via Proto-Germanic *fot-), Latin pes and its genitive pedis (giving English pedal, pedestrian, and podium), Greek pous (giving English podiatry and antipodes), and Sanskrit pad (foot). The pyjama word thus contains, hidden in its first syllable, a root shared with dozens of familiar English words.
The second element, jama (garment, clothing), is of Iranian origin. It appears in Persian as a general word for clothing and has no firmly established PIE etymology, though it is old within the Iranian branch of Indo-European.
The garment's journey to Britain followed the path of colonial contact. British East India Company officials and soldiers stationed in India during the 18th and 19th centuries encountered payjamas as comfortable, loose-fitting trousers suitable for the hot climate. They adopted the garment for informal wear, particularly as sleeping attire, and brought both the garment and the word back to Britain. The first English
By the mid-19th century, the meaning of pyjamas in English had narrowed from loose trousers of any kind to sleeping garments specifically. The garment also acquired a top, creating the two-piece matching set that the word denotes today, a development that occurred in English usage rather than in the original South Asian context. The Victorian-era adoption of pyjamas as standard male nightwear displaced the nightshirt, which had been the dominant sleeping garment in Britain for centuries.
The spelling split between British pyjamas and American pajamas emerged in the 19th century and has remained one of the most consistent transatlantic orthographic differences. The py- spelling more closely reflects the Persian and Hindustani source, while the pa- spelling represents an anglicized simplification. Both pronunciations converge on the same sounds.
Cognates of the pay element span the Indo-European world. English foot, German Fuss, Dutch voet, Swedish fot, Latin pes, Greek pous, Sanskrit pad, and Russian pyata (heel) all descend from the PIE *pods root. This makes the pay in pyjamas a distant relative of pedestrian, tripod, and podium.
In modern English, pyjamas refers to the two-piece sleeping garment consisting of loose trousers and a matching top. The word extends to pyjama party (or pajama party in American usage), a social gathering of the slumber-party type. The original South Asian garment, still widely worn in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh as part of the shalwar kameez ensemble, maintains the word's original meaning of everyday loose trousers. The English word has thus diverged from its source: what began as daytime public clothing became, in English, exclusively private nightwear.