tailor

A tailor is etymologically a ‘cutter’. The word was acquired from Anglo-Norman taillour, a variant of Old French tailleur. this went back to vulgar Latin *tāliātor ‘cutter’, a derivative of *tāliāre ‘cut’, which in turn was formed from Latin tālea ‘cutting’ (in the sense of a ‘piece of a plant removed for grafting or regrowing’). The specific application of the word to a ‘cutter or maker of clothes’ was foreshadowed in medieval Latin tāliātor vestium and Old French tailleur d’habits, and by the time it reached English, the memory of its etymological connection with ‘cutting’ had virtually disappeared; indeed in strict technical usage tailor ‘person who makes up clothes’ contrasts with cutter ‘person who cuts out the cloth’. other English descendants of tālea include detail, entail, retail, and tally (15^th c.) (which depends on another meaning of tālea, ‘twig’, hence ‘notches cut on a stick for counting’).