A Bit About Tweed

There are two often-recited stories for how tweed got its name. The first is that it was originally a misreading of tweel – an old Scottish word for twill – which was supposedly written on an invoice somewhere. How that misreading eventually made it into the more general vernacular, nobody knows, but it’s probably the pithiness of the story that counts. The other guess is that the word tweed refers to how the cloth originally came from the valley of the River Tweed. That, to me, seems like the more likely reason. Many ...