Matthew G. Robinson

An emerging bookbinder, food and beverage manager, occasional writer, and a patron of the arts.

Thursday, January 8, 2026

TIL VIII. A stake

Another Connections (New York Times) moment: TIL that American’s call a clothes peg ‘clothespin’. While the etymology is rather straight forward, being a compound or ‘clothes’ and ‘pin’ (describing a “pin for clothes”), I started to wonder about the origin of ‘peg’: likely from Middle-English pegge it holds roots from the Low German pigge meaning “stake” or “pin”.