In a Word: Looking for Tin in Tinsel

Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

When I was very young, I was even clumsier than I am now. So when it came time to decorate the Christmas tree, while the older people in my family strung the lights and hung glass bulbs and meaningful (and sometimes delicate) Christmas ornaments, I was in charge of the tinsel. I would drape these thin, shiny, metallic strands all over the tree, where they would sparkle like icicles under the lights. And if I happened to drop one on the floor, it wouldn’t shatter — unlike many of the other ornaments.

It didn’t occur to me wonder why it was called tinsel until much, much later. When I noticed the tin in the word. Did tinsel get its name because it was once made from tin?

Our English word tin hasn’t changed in the last millennium. Tin has apparently always been called tin in English; tin is mentioned in Old English writings, and no records have been uncovered that definitively trace it back to an earlier language. Other Germanic languages have a similar word for the metal, such as the Old Norse and Middle Dutch tin and the German Zinn.

The first-century A.D. Roman author and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder referred to tin as plumbum album — Latin for “white lead” — believing that it was actually silver that had been corrupted by lead. He was quite wrong, however: There isn’t a scintilla of lead or silver in pure tin.

Scintilla is an important word for this discussion. While in modern times we think of it as meaning “a tiny part, an iota,” in Latin it means “spark.” But in Vulgar Latin — the Latin of the masses — it is believed that two of the letters were transposed often enough (a linguistic phenomenon called metathesis) that the word stincilla came into being, but still meaning “spark.” Stincilla then evolved into the French word estencele “spark, spangle.”

By the 14th century, the first syllable of estencele had been muted enough that by the time it made it into England, it had become tencele. By the mid-15th century, it had become tinsel, a kind of cloth with gold or silver thread woven into it — that is, cloth with a “spark” to it. By the end of the 16th century, it referred just to the thin strips of shiny metal, whether they were woven into cloth or not — and regardless of what metal was used.

Which is how this thin, shiny metallic strips cascading from the Christmas trees of my youth got the name tinsel, which bears no etymological relation to the word tin.

Bonus Latin: Recognizing Pliny’s mistake, later natural philosophers and metallurgists gave tin the Late Latin name stannum, which is why on the periodic table the abbreviation for tin is Sn. Stannum also gave us the English word stannic “of or relating to tin.”