Other forms: girdles, girdled, girdling
A girdle is a belt or cord worn round the waist. The rope round a monk's robe, the woven sash on a dressing gown, the leather band a knight's sword hangs from.
For most of the twentieth century a girdle meant something else entirely: a piece of firm elastic underwear worn to flatten the stomach and hips, and that association still hangs over the word. For clothing you wear now, English says belt. What keeps girdle alive is its technical uses. In jewellery, the girdle of a cut diamond is the widest band round its middle, where the top half meets the bottom — it is what the setting grips. In anatomy, the pelvic girdle and the shoulder girdle are the rings of bone that hold the limbs onto the body. And there is a verb: mountains girdle the valley, meaning they ring it completely.
1noungirdleA belt or cord worn round the waist.
“A plain rope girdle was knotted at his waist.”
2nounfirmA piece of firm elastic underwear worn round the hips and stomach.
“Her mother wore a girdle under everything, even in August.”
3nounstoneThe widest band around a cut gem, where the crown meets the lower part.
“The claws of the setting close over the girdle of the stone.”
4nounringA ring of bones in the body supporting the arms or the legs.
“The shoulder girdle takes the strain every time you lift the box.”
5verbsurroundTo surround something completely.
“Old walls girdle the whole of the upper town.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Girdle is gird plus -le: the thing you gird yourself with, gird meaning to fasten a belt around something. Old English had gyrdel and Proto-Germanic *gurdilaz, both meaning belt, and the word is still standing across the family — German Gürtel, Dutch gordel, Swedish gördel, Icelandic gyrðill. The Proto-Indo-European root behind all of them is *gʰerdʰ-.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰerdʰ-
Proto-Germanic
*gurdilaz — girdle, belt
Proto-West Germanic
*gurdil
Old English
gyrdel
Middle English
girdel
English, today
girdle
From Middle English girdel, gerdel, gurdel, from Old English gyrdel, from Proto-West Germanic gurdil, from Proto-Germanic gurdilaz (“girdle, belt”), equivalent to gird + le. 2 Cognate with stq Gäddel (“belt”), West Frisian gurdle, gurle, gurl (“belt”), Dutch gordel (“belt”), German Gürtel (“belt”), Yiddish גאַרטל (“belt”) (whence a doublet of gartel, a doublet of girdle), Swedish gördel (“girdle”), Icelandic gyrðill (“girdle”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA