People sometimes exercise or do yoga in leotards.

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The garment is variously described as having long or short sleeves or legs or none at all, but in all cases being skin tight and as such being an inappropriate piece of attire for me.

Luckily the guy who popularized the leotard had a good body and is remembered as having a good body because he died when he was still young and attractively shaped. Maybe not lucky for him.

Jules Leotard was a French circus performer in the mid 1800s. He amazed crowds then the way that Cirque du Soleil amazes crowds today.

His specialty was the trapeze and he was the first to dare to let go of one trapeze, do a mid-air somersault and grab onto a second trapeze.

His innovative costume was skin tight from ankle to wrist with a more roomy pair of shorts in the middle. All this  supposedly to allow unrestricted freedom of movement, but with the added bonus—as anyone frequenting fitness clubs these days knows—of giving the audience a little more to look at.

What seems strange to me is that even though he was so famous in his day, and seems incontrovertibly to have been the reason that leotards are named leotards, it took quite a while after his death before this word shows up in the written record. He died in 1870—he was only 30—but the OED gives a first citation 50 years later in 1920.

The Merriam Webster etymology must have been compiled more recently because they offer a first citation of 1886 but that’s still a bit of a gap.

Jules Leotard himself didn’t refer to this garment as a leotard but instead as a maillot (pronounced “my oh”), a word that had only recently come into use in French.

Now it’s usually the name of a style of woman’s bathing suit.

Folk etymology had the source of this word also from someone’s name, supposedly a Monsieur Maillot who supplied the Paris Opera with such garments. But lexicographers find no evidence that Monsieur Maillot actually existed and instead point to a meaning of “swaddling clothing.”

Since most of us would not go into a clothing store and expect to be understood if we asked for something that would “swaddle us” I looked that up too.

It’s related to swathe. Babies are swaddled; which means they are wound up firmly in their blankets.