The word entered English in 1538, from Middle French. Its earliest recorded use appears in the treasury accounts of the Scottish crown, describing a length of yellow cloth made into a wrapper for one of King James V's gowns, sent to Stirling Castle, Scotland.
French had already been using the word for nearly two centuries before English borrowed it, as early as 1352. It was built from a suffix meaning little, added to a word for a length of cloth, or a net.
Behind the French word lay a Latin noun meaning 'net'. Behind that noun lay a verb meaning 'to weave'. Behind that lies a Proto-Indo-European root, *teks-, meaning 'to fabricate'. The same root gave Greek a word for a carpenter.
TEXT and SUBTLE share the same root. TEXT entered English in the late fourteenth century, first naming the wording of anything written, since scribes described their finished pages as having the even texture of a woven cloth. SUBTLE entered English around 1300, from a Latin word for the finest thread in a woven cloth.
By the eighteenth century the word had entered fashionable society, naming the elaborate process of washing, dressing, and arranging the hair before appearing in public. In revolutionary France the same word took on a darker meaning, describing the preparation of a prisoner's hair and neck before execution by guillotine. By the late nineteenth century, in America, the word had shifted entirely, coming to mean a small room designed for an altogether different purpose.
