I was wondering where the term 'button-down' comes from. I tried to do some research but I was not very successful…
How was the word button-down formed? Is it a compound ?
Does it originate from the noun "button", which then became the verb "to button" meaning to fasten? Then, how did it become an adjective ?
If the adjective "button-down" originates from the verb "to button (stg) down", shouldn't the adjective be "buttoned-down"? If so, how did it change to become only "button-down" ?
I looked up etymonline and the online merriam-webster but could not find any answer.
Can anybody answer this ?
Best Answer
Merriam-Webster Online's definition explicitly associates button-down with collars:
and it dates the first known use of the adjective to 1934. However, a Google Books search demonstrates that the usage is at least 18 years older.
From an ad for Wolff's Shirt Shops, in The Yale Literary Magazine (February 1916):
From Northwest Catalog Co. [Minneapolis, Minnesota], Catalog (1918) [snippet]:
From an ad for Buttrick & Frawley, in The Cornell Countryman (January 1921):
From "Fashion Forcast for Jackets and Coats," in The Boys' Outfitter (May 1921):
From an ad for Yale Co-op in The Yale Alumni Weekly (May 19, 1922):
Another early instance spells the adjective without a hyphen—and doesn't refer to collars at all. From an ad in Vanity Fair (1927) [snippet]:
A Google Books search also turned up several (but considerably fewer) early examples of "buttoned-down collar," including one especially early (but unverifiable) instance from a 1911 Sears Roebuck catalog.
From "Horse Show Fashions pro-English," in The Clothier and Furnisher (December 1921):
From "Collars," in The Clothier and Furnisher (April 1922):
To sum up, the Google Books search results suggest that "button-down collar" first achieved significant popularity in the northeastern United States among college students in the 1910s and early 1920s, and caught on more generally from there. At least one contemporaneous clothing industry journal (The Clothier and Furnisher) seems to have preferred the spelling buttoned-down, but the majority of haberdashers opted instead for button-down, and that spelling won out. I doubt that the shirt sellers in question based their decision on any grammatical theory.