The Jumper That Never Jumped

There are two kinds of people in the English-speaking world: those who put on a sweater and those who put on a jumper. The sweater, at least, is honest about its intentions; it was named, with true Victorian candour, for making athletes perspire. The jumper is altogether more mysterious. One may wear it for forty years without once being moved to leap, and yet the name sits there, faintly accusing, like a gym membership.

The answer is that the jumper has never jumped. It is a robe from Arabia that took the scenic route.

A word with a well in it

Arabic has a root, j-b-b, meaning “to cut, to cut off.” From it comes jubb, a hole cut into the ground: a pit, a cistern, a well. It is the very jubb into which Joseph’s brothers lowered him in the Qur’anic telling, before selling him into Egypt and a considerably better career. From the same root comes jubba, a long, loose outer garment with wide sleeves: something cut and made up. Tailoring and well-digging, it seems, were once regarded as allied trades.

The jubba is still worn: in Türkiye as the cübbe of judges and scholars, in Tunisia as the jebba (see the photograph). But its more adventurous career began when it crossed the Mediterranean.

Through Italy, by way of the wardrobe

In Italian it became giubba, a jacket, and from there it went through Europe like a moth through a cupboard. The Spanish kept the Arabic article and called it aljuba. The French made it jupe, which for centuries meant a man’s tunic before sliding gracefully down the body to become a skirt, as it remains today. A diminutive, jupon, gave English the padded tunic that knights wore over their armour. Germans got their Joppe, a stout jacket, and the Russians, with admirable climatic logic, turned it into shuba, a fur coat. The Poles, by way of Italian giuppone, acquired the żupan, a long coat that became the very uniform of the Polish nobility, so that a szlachcic in full fig was, sartorially speaking, dressed as an Arab. The word has a ghostly twin: the old Slavonic title župan, “lord of a district,” which survives in Croatia as the head of a county and in Romanian as jupân, “master, sir.” The two are entirely unrelated, which has never stopped anyone from assuming that a župan should wear a żupan.

Enter the Scots

English borrowed the French word early. Scots kept it as jupe, a loose jacket for men and later for women; the Wikipedia entry notes that Elizabeth I owned a “jupe or Gascon coat” for riding. Dialect English turned it into jump, a short coat, and by the 1850s sailors were wearing a loose canvas overshirt called a jumper. From the deck it passed to the drawing room, put on a good deal of wool along the way, and became the garment that British mothers press upon their children in the firm belief that it is cold outside.

So, strictly speaking, the jumper is a jubba with a sailor’s accent.

The clothes came first

Here is the delicious part. In English, the garment is older than the leap. When Chaucer introduces his Knight in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, in the 1380s, he tells us that “of fustian he wered a gypon”: a jupon, from the same Arabic family. The verb to jump, by contrast, does not appear until the 1520s, and appears from nowhere: it has no ancestors in Old or Middle English at all.

Where it came from is anyone’s guess, and etymologists have made several. The favourite is that it is imitative, belonging with bump to the family of words that sound like what they describe. A more romantic theory has English soldiers bringing it home from the Hundred Years’ War, borrowed from Gascon dialects in which jumba meant “to rock, to swing.” Swedish dialect has a suspiciously similar gumpa, “to leap,” though the Oxford English Dictionary declines to accept the relationship.

Wherever it came from, the upstart did well for itself. It elbowed aside the native leap, bound, and spring, and now does most of the jumping in the language. Meanwhile the jumper, which had been in English quietly for a century and a half before it, found itself saddled with a name that made everyone assume it was named after the newcomer. There is a moral here about seniority, but it would be undignified to draw it.

A postscript in February

This whole inquiry began, as such things do, with a calendar. In Turkish, January is Ocak, “the hearth,” and February is Şubat, which to a Slavic ear sounds irresistibly like that shuba, the fur coat. A cold month named after a warm coat: it seemed too good to be true, and it was.

Şubat came into Turkish from Arabic, into Arabic from Aramaic, and into Aramaic from Babylon, where the eleventh month was called šabāṭu. Jewish readers will know it as Shevat, the month of Tu BiShvat, the new year of trees. Its meaning is uncertain, but it is usually linked to an Akkadian verb meaning “to strike, to smite”; some prefer “to blow.” Either way, it is the month that batters Mesopotamia with storms and gales.

So February has nothing to do with fur coats. But a fur coat, it turns out, has a good deal to do with a well, a knight, a sailor, and a jumper that never jumped.