Tessa Hadley is not only one of my favorite living writers (see this anniversary post) but a source of interesting words (e.g., gabardine). My wife and I are currently reading Free Love, and when we got to “She stripped off the wallpaper and painted the walls white, ripped up the foul old carpet and bought a striped dhurrie in the market” I put down the book and said “What’s a dhurrie?” She said “I think it’s a kind of rug,” and that turns out to be correct. OED (entry from 1895): “A kind of cotton carpet of Indian manufacture, usually made in rectangular pieces with fringes at the ends, and used for sofa-covers, curtains, and similar purposes” (first cite 1880 “Dhurries are made in squares, and the ends often finished off with fringe; the colours are not bright, but appear durable,” Mrs. A. G. F. E. James, Indian Industries iv. 19); the etymology just says “< Hindi darī,” but Wiktionary takes the Hindi dubiously further:
Probably from Sanskrit स्तरी (starī).
This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.
Particularly: “Is this स्तरी as in a “sterile cow” or a “sterile night”? This seems semantically bold – is there a formation of स्तरी from स्तॄ (stṝ, “to spread, strew”) that’s possible? That would be much more semantically tenable.”
I’ll say it’s semantically bold, but I like the fact that they air their dubious linen in public.
Have a look at a dhurrie rug.
https://peterpap.com/product/cotton-dhurrie-rug/?srsltid=AfmBOop_r13DUkk4_dGN63-zdf99YleAxdOz3CPPhJGP6Em0mtBbZqXR
There are two homonyms that look like better candidates for an etymology in that very Wiktionary entry.
1. दरी • (darī) f (Urdu spelling دری) “Dari, Dari Persian”
2. Marathi दरी • (darī) f “valley”
See the entry darita in Turner here. For the semantic development, also consider the entry in Turner’s Nepali dictionary under dari ‘carpet’ here. Information on the IE root here.
(Short comment because I must go to sleep now.)
Addendum:
One sees on the Interwebz that some people attribute a Persian origin to the Hindi word… as ‘a carpet laid at the door’, ‘a carpet suitable for the royal court’, or something like that. Indeed, Steingass has a meaning ‘small carpet’ for درى darī here, about which even he is doubtful—and he throws in everything he could mine out of the great Persian dictionaries. It appears that Vullers in his Persian dictionary (at the end of the entry for درى darī ‘of a door, of the door’ here) gives the only authority for this meaning as being Shakespear’s Hindustani–English dictionary here. (Shakespear gives a blanket Persian etymology to the Hindustani word at the beginning of the entry.) So it seems this Persian darī, if it was in fact used, would be a Hindustani loanword into Persian as used in South Asia.
AHD, probably using the same sources as Xerîb’s first comment:
I’d expect anyone who had to decorate a space in the city in the ’70s on a budget to have encountered dhurries. There was a time when dealers like Peter Pap would have ignored most flatweaves, let alone cotton ones from India.
It’s a word that ought to be in Hobson-Jobson, as durree or something, but is not, as far as I can tell. Enshittified Web search will happily hallucinate such an entry, of course. There are entries with ḍoriyā, for “kind of cloth.” DE WP, s.v. dari, relates those, but I’m not so sure.
I am skeptical about the split-cane etymology, absent evidence that the term was used for such rugs. Durries are traditionally made of cotton, a very different material in terms of weaving techniques.
The d~dh variants are puzzling (WAry “dhurri, dhurry, durry”). Possibly the h was added by English speakers to make it look more Indian. But then, the Bengali WP entry has “দরি (এছাড়াও ধুরি, ডুরি, দুরি বা ধারি)”, i.e. ‘dari (also dhuri, ḍuri, duri or dhari)’ (<a> is [ɔ], <u> is [u].) Do those forms reflect a reborrowing from the written form as variously transliterated in English?
Ann Shankar and Jenny Housego’s Bridal Durries of India (1997) discuss the etymology some (p. 36):
In the above, I like the dar : dari :: farsh : farshi idea, but not the others.
The authors note that while durries may go back some two thousand years, and various names are attested and used for them, the term dari ~ durrie itself is late. Unfortunately they don’t say how early it is attested.
Quite apart from the clear semantic impossibility of “sterile cow” to “rug”, initial st > d (or str > d) is a pretty odd sound change.
Is there any parallel to that in Hindi?
Contrast e.g.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Iranian/st%C3%A1Hnam
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%A5%E0%A4%B0#Hindi
I just confirmed a naming oddity that I thought I remembered; “B. H. Baden-Powell” was actually short for “Baden Henry Baden-Powell,” a rather peculiar name. He was originally Christened “Baden Henry Powell,” after his father, the minister and writer Baden Powell, and in his youth he went by “Henry.” The name Baden had, as you might have guessed originated as a family surname used as a given name. The elder Baden Powell was considered an important Victorian intellectual (although he is far less well known now than his son, Robert who founded the Boy Scouts, for which he was made a hereditary peer) and at some point his children switched to using the double-barreled surname (much more distinctive than just Powell) to more closely identify the family with their father. However, that may have left Henry in something of an awkward position; in any case, he always went by his initials after the change in surname.
Baden Baden-Powell would be nicely parallel to the once-prominent Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
To say nothing of James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree:
https://www.best-poems.net/milne/disobedience.html
(A masterpiece of understated horror, subtly hinting at the existential abyss we unthinkingly traverse every day, oblivious of What Lies Beneath.)
I thought I had read that ‘durry’ (or ‘durrie’), an Australian colloquialism for ‘cigarette’, was related to ‘dhurrie’ being discussed here, and some sources I’ve checked now say so. I could even imagine a connection between a rolled-up rug and a roll-your-own cigarette. However, the Australian National Dictionary (online) says:
durry n. (Spelling variant: durrie.) [Of unknown origin. Perhaps an alteration of the American tobacco proprietary name Bull Durham. It is unlikely to be related to dhurrie, the heavy cotton Indian rug. Also NZ: DNZE 1984.] A cigarette.
Interestingly, although the citations the AND has from 1972 to 2014 show ‘durry’ meaning ‘cigarette’, their first citation and the only citation before 1972 is more restrictive:
1941 S.J. Baker Pop. Dict. Austral. Slang 26 Durry, a cigarette butt.
I don’t have that book, but Baker later seems to have had a different opinion. In Baker’s ‘The Australian Language’ (1945, revised 1966), he states simply that a ‘durry’ is a ‘cigarette’.
Green says:
other theories suggest Ulster durrie, anything small
This Ulster word durrie ‘miserable-looking person or animal’, ‘anything small of its kind’, is apparently from Irish deoraí ‘pitiable person’ (earlier deoradh ‘outsider, someone whose rights have been lost or restricted; outcast; wanderer; stranger’). Kuno Meyer’s etymology from *de–fo–rath is here. (Cf. the contrasting term aurrad.) D. A. Binchy apparently proposed an alternative etymology with ráth as the final member of the compound, but I have been able to look that up yet.
Neat — I love Irish etymologies!