1633: gauntlet Jun 4, 2019

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It is not uncommon in English words that end in -et to find they come from French, and this is especially true of older words, because it is a French diminutive suffix, like in 'ballet' or 'pocket'. 'Gauntlet', for instance, is a long glove, particularly in armor. Indeed, the word for 'glove' in French, then and now, is 'gant', but this comes from Germanic origin. The word in German for a 'glove' is 'Handshuh' [2] (literally 'hand-shoe), but it wasn't always so literal. In Frankish the word was 'want', and this is still true in other Germanic languages like Dutch, Danish, and Swedish more or less. It is less common that a Germanic word would enter a Romance language than the reverse, but even Medieval Latin got the word for 'glove', 'wantus', from this.

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