In a Word: Getting Vamped Up

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.

The word vamp has two main senses, with two very different histories.

The sense of vamp as “a seductive and manipulative woman” burst into popularity with the 1915 movie A Fool There Was, in which Theda Bara portrays a man-stealer and -ruiner billed as “The Vampire” — though she wasn’t of the blood-sucking, mirror-avoiding, garlic-intolerant type. The shortening vamp began to appear with some regularity after the premiere of this silent film that made Bara a star.

This wasn’t the first occurrence of vampire to mean “seductress,” though — the movie was based on a Porter Emerson Browne novel of the same name, which itself was based on “The Vampire,” a poem written by Rudyard Kipling in 1897 (the same year Bram Stoker’s Dracula was first published). Regardless, this points to this vamp’s history as a shortening of vampire, a word used in English as far back as 1732. English borrowed the word from French, which borrowed it from German, which acquired the word from one of several possible Eastern European cultures.

Vamp also has a musical sense that comes from live theater. To vamp is to repeat a section of music an unspecified number of times until the rest of the troupe is ready to continue. A band or accompanist might vamp for a number of reasons, for example: to allow the main performer to converse with the audience without stopping the music, to give a performer time to change costumes backstage, or to build anticipation for the appearance of a performer.

This type of vamp (which can also describe the repeated section of music itself) dates to the late 18th century, and it has nothing to do with mythical creatures. Instead, it starts with shoes.

About a millennium ago, Parisian cobblers and their customers referred to the part of a shoe or stocking that covers the top and front of the foot as the avant-pié, which is a straightforward description: It begins with the same avant we find in avant garde; it means “in front of, before.” Pié is French for “foot.” Avant-pié is the “fore-foot.”

Given French pronunciation and English articles, it’s easy to see how, when it came to the north side of the English Channel, avant-pié became a vaumpé in Anglo-French. By the mid-17th century, that part of the shoe was just a vamp in English.

The word was also used as a verb: To vamp meant “to replace the vamp of a shoe.” But we English speakers like to impose order on our words — when something is being done for a second or third time (that is, being redone), we like that re- prefix to make it clear. So by the middle of the 19th century, you might go to a cobbler not only to resole a shoe, but to revamp it as well.

The metaphorical use of revamp as “renovate” or “reassess and alter” has grown (and the shoe repair industry shrunk) so much in the intervening years that the word’s link to footwear has nearly disappeared. Vamp is still used among shoe makers and ballet dancers, though.

But how did this piece of cobbler jargon find a home in music? That is not as clear. Perhaps the earliest form of vamping was something done by an accompanist and a dancer (who would put their vamps to work) to fill time and silence while the main act prepares. Or maybe it evolved from the idea of keeping an audience’s toes tapping (that is, keeping their vamps moving). We may never know.