zamsz

Polish

Borrowed from Czech zámiš, from Middle High German samisch, later sämisch, from Middle French chamois, identical to the animal name chamois; in this understanding also Spanish gamuza and Portuguese camurça use the same word for the caprine and for the hide.

Discarded derivations

Note that a lot of false etymologies circulate about this fabric's name:

derived from Turkic, Turkish semiz (“fat”), due to the use of fish oil in tanning, allegedly via Arabic dialects, also linking via شَحْم‎ (šaḥm) and سَمْن‎ (samn, “fat”) which are completely unrelated to the Turkic word;
in German sources, it is often alleged on the basis of the spellings to have come from Middle Dutch; a corrupt version of this story derives the word from Dutch seem (“*soft, *weich”) which is not known in Dutch;
the similarity in Kazakh referring to shammy, apart from күдері (küderı) by жұмсақ тері (jūmsaq terı, literally “soft leather”), is a coincidence;
a rarer, baseless claim derives the word from Sambia in Eastern Prussia;
some have considered a Slavic origin, though the Slavic words postdate the German attestations and even more so the Romance ones, and Slavic internal derivations, if attempted, are vagary, such as connecting the word with замше́ть (zamšétʹ, “to become mossy”).

zamsz m inan

Declension of zamsz

adjective

→ Israeli Hebrew: זמש‎ (zamš)
→ Russian: за́мша (zámša), замш m (zamš), замшь m (zamšʹ)
- → Armenian: զամշ (zamš)
- → Georgian: ზამში (zamši)
→ Ukrainian: за́мша (zámša)

Kobert, Rudolf (1916), “Beiträge zur Geschichte des Gerbens und der Adstringentien”, in Archiv für die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik (in German), volume 7, Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, pages 188–189 and Kobert, Rudolf (1916), “Beiträge zur Geschichte des Gerbens und der Adstringentien”, in Archiv für die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik (in German), volume 7, Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, pages 329–330
Steinhauser, Walter (1961), “Die deutschen Stammesnamen in slawischem Munde”, in Jahrbuch für fränkische Landesforschung‎ (in German), volume 21, page 332
Vasmer, Max (1964–1973), “за́мша”, in Этимологический словарь русского языка [Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language] (in Russian), transl. and suppl. by Oleg Trubachyov, Moscow: Progress
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