Word of the day: oaktag

Clued as “Postcard paper,” oaktag appeared in the Newsday Saturday Stumper this past Saturday. I hadn’t thought of the word for years.

Merriam-Webster directs the looker-upper to tagboard : “strong cardboard used especially for making shipping tags.” The Oxford English Dictionary has a proper entry for oaktag: “a thin, tough, lightweight cardboard, usually made from kraft and jute pulp and having a smooth finish and manilla colour.” The OED marks the word as of American origin, with a first citation from 1914. Its etymology is left a mystery: “formed within English, by compounding.” But I could’ve told you that.

The American Heritage Dictionary suggests two possible origins:

Perhaps from its color, which originally resembled that of the oak boards used in book bindings until the 16th century, or perhaps from oakum board, a kind of sturdy paperboard made from oakum.

Sturdy, hmm — like an oak? But oakum appears to have no relation to oak.

A message in a 2002 thread at linguist.list.org cites a speculation from the lexicographer Lawrence Urdang in American Speech (Spring 1984):

Oaktag is a dark beige, which may account for the oak- part of its name. In the 1930s and later, shipping tags were often made of this material, typically with a hole at one end, reinforced with a stiff red circular grommet and a short piece of cord for tying to a package. It seems likely to me that the universal application of the stock to such use accounts for the -tag part of oaktag. This is, of course, a folk eytmology — but then, oaktag appears to be a folk name, doesn’t it?“

Urdang was replying to a query about the word in American Speech (Fall 1982) from the linguist David Gold, who had suggested that oaktag may be something of a New York City-ism. Messages in the 2002 linguist.list thread suggest that oaktag might be something of a New York or East Coast word for a product also known as posterboard, or posterboard. I would think of posterboard though as thicker and white — certainly not “manilla colour.”

Oaktag makes me think of school supplies of yore: mucilage, oilskin, jars of paste with brushes built into the lids. And, much later: Eaton’s Corrasable Bond.

How lovely, by the way, to see manilla, so spelled.

[I’ve quoted the correct version of Urdang’s comment, slightly misquoted on the listserv.]