n. (pl.)
WA skirtis
‘skirts, lower part of flowing garment or covering; flaps of a saddle, saddle-skirts’
(Modern English skirt)cp. OIcel skyrta ‘shirt, kind of kirtle’ < PGmc *skurtjōn, cp. OE scyrte ‘shirt’ (PDE shirt), MLG schorte ‘apron’, related to PGmc *skurta- ‘short’ (OE sceort etc.). The ON word itself is potentially a loan from OE or LG (see Orel and against this view De Vries).
PGmc Ancestor
*skurtjōn
Proposed ON Etymon (OIcel representative)
skyrta ‘shirt, kind of kirtle’
(ONP skyrta (sb.))
Other Scandinavian Reflexes
Far skjúrta, Icel skyrta, Norw skyrta, skjurta, ODan skyrtæ, skiortæ, Dan skjorte, OSw skyrta, skjurta, Sw skjorta
OE Cognate
scyrte ‘shirt’
Phonological and morphological markers
absence of palatalization of */sk/
Summary category
A1*c
The first attestation in MED is a by-name from (1224) Pat.R.Hen.III. There is some indication of N and E bias in the citations, but increasingly frequent during the 15c.
Occurrences in the Gersum Corpus
Gaw 171, 601, 865; WA 1533
The Gaw MS is generally read as <sturtes> at 171 and this is the form retained by Madden, Morris and TG, but other editors prefer a form of ME skirt (see TGD (171n), Burrow and PS skyrtes, GDS (171n), CA skurtes), and AW, Vant (171n) and McGillivray indeed read the MS as <scurtes>. On the sense of Gaw 601 see Wright 1935: 344.