949: jacket Jul 15, 2017

There are plenty of English words with historically French diminutive suffixes that don't necessarily convey things being small anymore, like 'pocket', though some, like 'cygnet', still do. Included on that list is also 'budget' and 'ballet, all of which posses '-et' at the end. It can be fun and enlightening to look into other words that have that '-et' as an ending, though technically not a suffix anymore. Another such word is 'jacket' which, like the other words above, does not have an obvious relation to what is left when the historical suffix is removed, in this case 'jack'. Here however, consider that the word is from French, where there is a name like 'Jack' but spelt instead, 'Jacque'. This was not only a name though, but also a nickname the nobility gave to poor people, which also gave English 'jacquerie'. 'Jacket' was a diminutive used to describe short tunics that peasants or sometimes foot-soldiers wore.