sewing Sewing is the craft of fastening pieces of textiles together using a sewing needle and thread. Sewing is one of the oldest of the textile arts, arising in the Paleolithic era. Before the invention of spinning yarn or weaving fabric, archaeo ...

, the armscye is the armhole, the fabric edge to which the

sleeve A sleeve (, a word allied to '' slip'', cf. Dutch ) is the part of a garment that covers the arm, or through which the arm passes or slips. The sleeve is a characteristic of fashion seen in almost every country and time period, across a myri ...

is sewn. The length of the armscye is the total length of this edge; the width is the distance across the hole at the widest point.

Etymology

Multiple theories for the etymology of "armscye" have been proposed. The scholarly

etymology Etymology ( ) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time. In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. ...

has the origin as "arm" + "scye." The first documented use of "scye" in print is by Jamieson (1825) Suppl.: "sey," a Scots and Ulster dialect word (written also scy, sci, si, sie, sy in glossaries) meaning ‘the opening of a gown, etc., into which the sleeve is inserted; the part of the dress between the armpit and the chest (of obscure etymology, and sometimes confused with "scythe" due to similarly curved shapes). A more fanciful folk etymology is as follows. Because the expression "arm's eye" was used in some older sewing texts (e.g. "Gynametry," published in 1887) it is conjectured that in poor prints the apostrophe and the crossbar of the lower case "e" were indistinct, and the

neologism In linguistics, a neologism (; also known as a coinage) is any newly formed word, term, or phrase that has achieved popular or institutional recognition and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. Most definitively, a word can be considered ...

"armscye" was created by readers who concatenated the orphaned fragments "arm" and "s" with the corrupt "cye". According to this undocumented theory, until the beginning of the 20th century writers favoured the original term or at least a more logical variation (e.g. "armeye" in ''The Perfect Dressmaking System,'' published in 1914), but as self-proclaimed experts copied each other, the term "armscye" eventually became widely enough used by home sewers to gain general acceptance. The latter theory is clearly contradicted by evidence (discussed above) that the term "scye" was already in use at least as early as 1825. Therefore, the erroneous folk analysis was not in the direction from "arm's eye" to "armcye", but rather from the original "armcye" to "arm's eye" (which made more sense to

modern English Modern English, sometimes called New English (NE) or present-day English (PDE) as opposed to Middle and Old English, is the form of the English language that has been spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England England is a Count ...

speakers, with a later adjustment more recently back to the correct "armscye").

References

Armscye & Armhole measurement in sewing

Etymology

See also

References

Further reading