Textiles and fashion

The twenty-second entry is o punho, and it is one Portuguese noun standing where English reaches for three unrelated ones. Here it is the cuff: o punho da camisa, the band at the end of a sleeve, buttoning twice in the sentence on this page. Close the hand and the same word is the fist, because cerrar o punho is to clench one, and the blow landed with it is um murro. Put a blade or a stick inside that closed hand and the word moves again: o punho da espada is the hilt, o punho da bengala the handle of a walking stick, the part shaped to be gripped. One picture holds all three together, the closed hand and whatever surrounds it, and Portuguese never needed to break it up. « Cuff », « fist » and « hilt » have nothing to do with one another, and none of the three can be guessed from either of the others. So the tailoring sense costs an English reader almost nothing, and the two further meanings arrive free with it — as long as o punho in a fencing manual does not send the reader looking for shirts.