| tiffany \TI-feh-ni\ (noun) - A thin, transparent gauze of silk or cotton muslin.
"Manon walked slowly down the aisle, her face all but hoodwinked in a tiffany veil."
As befits a word of its stature, the ancestry of today's word is positively celestial: it is an ancient French word, tiphanie "Epiphany," a descendant of Late Latin "theophania" with the same meaning. (It may have originally referred to a special material worn on Epiphany or other church holidays.) The Latin word was taken from Greek "theophaneia," based on theo- "god" + phan- from phainein "to show," hence, an appearance of God. The Greek root "theo-" is akin to Latin festus "festive" and fanum "temple," whence our "festival," "fete," and "fanatic" (shortened to "fan" in sports), "profane," respectively. |
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