According to the American Heritage Dictionary as well as the OED the name for the fabric we call tweed seems to have been one of those great words that came about by accident.

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I am not always a great speller so I can sympathize.

What is supposed to have happened is that in 1826 William Watson of Hawick, Scotland sent James Locke, a London merchant, an invoice requiring payment for a shipment of twill fabric.

The name twill comes from the two different yarns twisted together and used in this fabric.

With his Scottish accent he pronounced—and evidently spelled—the word tweel.

Whether it was a spelling mistake on Watson’s part or a difficulty in reading the handwriting on Locke’s part I don’t know, but Locke seemed to think he had gotten a shipment of tweed not tweel and the rest is history.

But history didn’t stop then.

Tweed is often associated with a classy but casual look, even sporty in a sort of “shooting birds on the estate” kind of way. This is because one Lady Dunmore in 1940 upped the ante by introducing Harris Tweed among her aristocratic sporty friends.

Harris Tweed is still a trade mark of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland but in the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, Harris Tweed was evidently rhyming slang during the 1980s for speed— methedrine that is.

And we evidently are still living in what later will be history because urbandictionary.com informs me that these days in some circles tweed means “marijuana.”