What, asks the columnist Philologus in the online magazine Mosaic, is the difference between a kippah and a yarmulke? I’m glad he supplied an answer, for I know no Yiddish and less Hebrew, and the Oxford English Dictionary is reticent.
Kippah first appeared in the OED in 1997, with the bare etymology ‘from Hebrew’. Philologus observes that it denotes ‘any skullcap worn by a Jew for religious reasons’. He suggests that kippah derives from a word in early rabbinic Hebrew (from the time of the compilation of the Mishnah, the first century in AD-dating). That Hebrew word meant ‘dome’ or ‘vault’, either of a building or of the heavens. This sounds a satisfying derivation.
But Philologus introduces the possibility that kippah in the sense ‘cap’ comes from the Latin cappa, which gave us the English cap, once meaning ‘hood’ or ‘cloak with a hood’, until it settled down in the Middle Ages to mean ‘brimless male head-dress’.
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