pellis

Pelisse arrives in English from French pelisse, which derives from Medieval Latin pellicia (a fur garment), from Latin pellis (skin, hide, fur). The Latin root is ancient: pellis is cognate with Greek pella (hide), Old English fell (animal skin), and ultimately connects to the Proto-Indo-European root *pel- (skin, hide). The primary meaning in medieval and early modern French was simply a fur-lined or fur-trimmed garment, a general term for any coat with animal skin as lining or decoration. This was the word that attached itself to a very specific Hungarian hussar garment and became specialized through military usage.

The hussar pelisse was the companion piece to the dolman jacket. Where the dolman was worn normally — through both sleeves — the pelisse was identical in construction but worn slung from one shoulder, hanging down the left side of the body, held in place by a chain at the collar. It might be put on in extreme cold, but ideally it hung decoratively, the fur-lined interior turned partly outward to display its luxury, the empty sleeve swinging with the movement of the horse. The effect was deliberately theatrical: asymmetric, expensive-looking, a visual advertisement of the hussar's combination of military function and aristocratic style. As hussar regiments spread across European armies in the eighteenth century, every regiment adopted this pelisse convention, so that the hanging jacket became as recognizable a hussar marker as the braided dolman or the shako.

French military vocabulary absorbed the pelisse from contact with Hungarian hussar practice, and French became the conduit through which the word reached other European languages. English military usage is first documented in the 1760s. By the Napoleonic period the pelisse — now spelled consistently in English — was universal hussar equipment, and the famous portraits of officers from this era always show the characteristic hanging jacket: the subject often depicted in three-quarter view specifically to show both the dolman worn normally and the pelisse suspended beside it.

The word then underwent an interesting civilian transfer. From roughly 1810 to 1870, pelisse was used in English for a woman's long coat or cloak, especially one trimmed or lined with fur — reverting, in a sense, toward the original French meaning of any fur-lined outer garment. And a further narrowing occurred in the nursery: from the early nineteenth century, pelisse named a long infant's robe or coat, the garment in which babies and very young children were dressed, typically of silk or fine wool. The connection was through the fur lining that both the hussar garment and expensive infant clothes sometimes shared, plus the general sense of a long protective outer covering. This nursery meaning has largely faded, but it appears regularly in nineteenth-century literature — Jane Austen's characters dress their babies in pelisses — making it a word that connects cavalry flamboyance and domestic tenderness through the same fur-lined etymology.