Azulejos

A friend sent a nice postcard from Portugal showing the outside of a church covered with old blue tiles. She said it reminded her of delft ware.

That word has its own historical peculiarity. We used to call it delf, as you can find in Dickens and his contemporaries. That is because the town of Delf was spelt in the same way, taking its name from its chief canal. The Dutch shared with the English (though we have largely forgotten it) a word delf meaning ‘ditch’ — something delved or dug. But then the town added a t to its name to make it Delft, and the English followed suit in the spelling of the earthenware. Anyway, the blue of Portuguese tiles is caught in an even less likely knot of language.

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Tiles in Portuguese are azulejos (the same word as in Spanish).