It wasn't till the 1800s that the knitted thing that keeps our necks and noses warm on wintry January days came to be called a “scarf” rather than a “muffler”.
Originally, a scarf (escarpe in medieval French) was a kind of sling worn diagonally in which pilgrims carried the alms they begged on their way to a shrine. When the word came into English as “scarf” in the 1500s, it was used for a diagonal sash worn across the chest by military officers – now seen only decoratively in dress uniform but formerly a practical accessory for carrying things.
The Oxford English Dictionary, in an entry dating from 1910 which lists scarfs before scarves as the plural, has this to say about the plural:
"The original plural form scarfs has never gone out of use; but from the beginning of the 18th cent. the form scarves (on the analogy of halves, etc.) has been common, and in London commercial use it appeared to have become universal in the early 20th cent. No other noun of other than native origin had this change of f into v in the plural."Personally I would only use scarves, and some searches in corpora show that scarves outnumbers scarfs in a ratio of about 20 to 1 in North American English and 35 to 1 in British English. But I'm curious to know what you would use. Let me know in the comments!
Some of you will be wondering where the verb scarf (eat) comes from. This is a fairly recent addition to English, dating from the 1960s, and is a variant of "scoff", the origin of which is unclear.
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