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The verbs don and doff go together. Here's how.

I recently heard a radio commentator say that someone had "donned the uniform" of a particular baseball team — and the strangeness in my ear made me realize how rare that verb, don, has become. In the Christmas carol, "Deck the Halls," we sing, "Don we now our gay apparel," but that's about the only time any of us would use the word. (Baseball commentators can scarcely be considered normal users of English.)

The verb is simply a contracted (or rather, to be precise, a coalesced) form of do on, a once-common phrase meaning "to put on." (And can we claim that do is any stranger a verb for that than put? Not really.) For instance, in the Douay-Rheims Bible, an early English translation published in 1582, Romans 13:14 says, "Doe ye on our Lord Jesus Christ," where the King James Version just a few years later (in 1611) has, "[P]ut ye on the Lord Jesus Christ."

Through common usage "to do on" became "to don." Similarly, its counterpart "do off" coalesced into "doff" — though this word is even more restricted. At least don can still mean to put on any item of clothing — but doff these days is used almost exclusively for hats, and almost always just figuratively even at that. As the OED puts it, it most often means "to take off or 'raise' (the head-gear) by way of a salutation or token of respect." Even by the time of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (in 1755), he noted it was "in all its senses obsolete, and scarcely used except by rustics."

Both of these, however, enjoyed a comeback in the 1800s, with the literary fashion for archaic terms and good old Anglo-Saxon expressions. In that way they're typical of English usage, which delights not just in neologisms but also in dipping back into the word-hoard to revive words once deemed worn out. We try words on for size, we take them off, we don them again.

Update: Thanks to a reader's email, I can pass along the information that doff is also still in use in another context: "The military and other users of chemical suits use the verb...when the items that constitute the suits are to be removed in a specific order for decontamination."

Further update: I've learned from another reader that doff and don are "still used extensively in OSHA regulations referring to respirators and other PPE (personal protective equipment)."

Still further update: Thanks to another reader, here's another contextual variant: "I am a physiotherapist in England. We use these terms with regard to lower limb prosthetics. A client is said to 'don' and 'doff' their artificial leg. The process of donning is quite precise and involves applying layers of socks and a socket around the stump before the application of the prosthetic limb."

first published Nov 1, 2004