pajamas
nounpa·ja·mas/pəˈdʒɑ.məz/
Loose clothes for sleeping, usually a shirt and trousers. Also the loose trousers worn in India and its neighbors.
From Hindi and Urdu pājāma, from Persian pāy, “leg”, plus jāma, “garment”.54 Etymonline finds it in English in 1800 as pai jamahs, trousers worn by Muslims in India and taken up by Europeans there.4 The British spelling is pyjamas.7
“A pair of loose drawers or trowsers, tied round the waist.”
Page 748 of Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, new edition by William Crooke, London, 1903. The entry first appeared in 1886. Scan via the Internet Archive. See the page there.
Meanings
Three meanings in use today
- Loose trousers worn in South Asia. Worn by both sexes in various countries, India among them.7She wore white cotton pajamas tied at the waist.
- A colored cricket uniform. Slang for the kit worn in professional limited-overs matches. Wiktionary marks it as slang.7Both sides will play in pajamas tonight.
In sentences
- The kids came down for breakfast in their pajamas.
- He packed one pair of pajamas for the weekend.
His chief joy smoking a cigar / In loose Paee-jams and native slippers.
From the Oriental Sporting Magazine, 1828, as quoted in the 1903 edition of Hobson-Jobson.1The rest of our attire consisted of that particularly light and airy white flannel garment, known throughout India as a pajama suit.
Haekel, Ceylon, as the glossary prints it under 1881.1
Words people mix up with it
- pyjamas
- The same word, spelled the British way. Wiktionary says pyjamas uses the classical Persian spelling of pāy, “leg”, and calls pajamas chiefly American.7
- PJs, jammies, jams
- Casual shortenings. Etymonline dates jams to 1966.74
- nightgown, nightshirt
- Merriam-Webster’s thesaurus lists both as related words.6
- shalwar
- Hobson-Jobson spells it shulwaur and lists it, with long drawers and Mogul breeches, as another name for the same garment.1
Synonyms
Synonyms and antonyms for pajamas
Synonyms
- For clothes worn in bednightwear, sleepwear, nightclothes, bedwear, nightgear.8 Informally, PJs and jammies.7
- For the trouserslong drawers, shalwar, Mogul breeches, as Hobson-Jobson lists them.1
Antonyms
English has no exact antonym for pajamas. Merriam-Webster’s thesaurus lists one dissimilar word.6
- For clothesouterwear
Through time
What the word meant, year by year
Johnson’s 1755 dictionary and Webster’s 1828 one don’t have the word. It reached English print in the first years of the 1800s, as the name of trousers worn in India. Drag the line and read what people wrote.
From the bedroom to the beach
Hobson-Jobson calls the garment an article of dishabille and of night attire
, and dishabille means being casually or partly dressed.1 It was never only for bed. The French advertisement shows beach pyjamas in 1930, and Wikipedia adds that Western men’s sleepwear caught on from about 1870.9 The Persian word says nothing at all about sleep. It names the leg and the garment that covers it.4
Route to English
How a Persian phrase reached London shops
- pāy + jāmaPersian, “leg” and “garment”. Persian pāy-jāma means trousers or drawers.74
- pājāmaHindi and Urdu, borrowed from Persian.57 Hobson-Jobson writes it pāe-jāma, literally “leg-clothing”.1
- pai jamahs, pyjammasEnglish in India, 1800 and after. Europeans took the habit from Muslims there.41
- pajamas, pyjamasEnglish in London, the shops of 1886, and the American spelling by 1845.14
The stops are regions, not routes. Nobody documented a single journey. Yule and Burnell also suggest the habit came through the Portuguese, and they call that only probable.1
Why dates differ
Why dictionaries give two years
The dates sit within a year of each other, so the argument is small. It is still worth asking what each source is dating.
| Source | Gives | What it is dating |
|---|---|---|
| Etymonline4 | 1800 | pai jamahs, “loose trousers tied at the waist” |
| Merriam-Webster5 | 1801 | The word pajama in the sense defined, with no quotation shown |
| Oxford English Dictionary, as cited by Wikipedia9 | 1801 | Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register. The OED is paywalled, so we haven’t seen the line |
| Hobson-Jobson1 | 1828, 1881, 1886 | Quotations and the entry itself, under the older spelling pyjammas |
| Johnson and Webster23 | None | No entry for any spelling, in 1755 or 1828 |
We can’t say whether the one-year gap between Etymonline and the OED is two different texts or one text dated two ways. Etymonline’s own page names no source for 1800.
Measured
The word, measured
Psychologists have asked thousands of people about tens of thousands of words. Here is where pajamas lands in five of those datasets.
How many people know it
Of 403 people shown it, 95.3% said they knew it, more than for 62% of the 61,855 words tested. Estimates by group: Americans 98.8%, British 83.6%, men 92.9%, women 96.2%.11
When people learn it
The average age adults recall learning it, earlier than about 100% of 31,105 words. The middle word on the list comes at 11.2. These are adults’ estimates, so read them as a rough guide.12
How concrete it feels
People rate it as something you can experience directly, more so than 92% of 39,954 words. Agreement is moderate: 26 raters, standard deviation 0.83.13
Which sense it calls up
Sight comes first, stronger than for 81% of 39,707 words, and touch is close behind at 95%.15
Scale 0 to 5.
Ratings come from panels of roughly 20 to 30 people per word, asked about the word out of context. Percentages are how pajamas ranks among the words in that dataset.
Where does your vocabulary land?
Twelve words, each known by fewer Americans than the last. See your estimate against the same 221,268 people in the study above.11
Measure my vocabularyRelatives
Its relatives, and a few impostors
- pyjamas
- The same word with the British spelling. Wiktionary says it follows the classical Persian spelling of pāy.7
- jam
- Earlier English picked up jam, “a kind of frock for children”, in 1793 and comes from Hindi jamah, the second half of the word.4
- jams
- Etymonline dates it to 1966, cut from pajamas.4
- pāy
- The first half, “leg”. Etymonline traces it to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “foot”.4
- pajama party
- The phrase Merriam-Webster lists with the word.5
- Impostors
- Pajamahadeen, llama’s pajamas and the cat’s pyjamas are English plays on the word. Wiktionary lists them as derived terms and doesn’t explain how they began.7
Pajamas in other languages
- pijamaSpanish
- pijamaPortuguese
- pyjamaFrench
- PyjamaGerman
- pigiamaItalian
- пижа́маRussian
- piżamaPolish
- pijamaTurkish
- パジャマJapanese
- 파자마Korean
- पाजामाHindi
- פִּיגָ׳מָהHebrew
Wiktionary lists Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Tagalog as descendants through the singular English pajama.7
Test yourself
Four questions from this page
Sources
Where every claim comes from
We read the Hobson-Jobson pages, Johnson, Webster and the data files ourselves, and calculated the numbers on this page from those files. Everything else is credited to the source that says it. Etymonline and Merriam-Webster blocked our requests, so we read their Internet Archive copies. Checked on 5 November 2026. If something is wrong, write to hello@lexicist.com.
- Yule, Henry, and A. C. Burnell. Hobson-Jobson: a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases. First edition, London, 1886; new edition by William Crooke, London, 1903. Entry “Pyjammas”, p. 748 of the 1903 edition. Scan via the Internet Archive. Open page 748. The 1886 text: archive.org/details/cu31924012794628
- Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. 1755. We searched pajama and pajamas and found no entry. johnsonsdictionaryonline.com
- Webster, Noah. An American Dictionary of the English Language. 1828. We searched pajama, pajamas, pyjama and pyjamas and found no entry. webstersdictionary1828.com
- Harper, Douglas. “pajamas”. Online Etymology Dictionary. We read it through its Internet Archive copy, because the live site blocked our requests. etymonline.com/word/pajamas
- Merriam-Webster, “pajama”. Read through its Internet Archive copy, because the live site blocked our requests. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pajama
- Merriam-Webster Thesaurus, “pajamas”, Related Words and Dissimilar Words. Read through its Internet Archive copy. merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/pajamas
- Wiktionary, “pajamas”, English section, with its translation table. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pajamas
- Wiktionary, “Thesaurus:nightwear”. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:nightwear
- Wikipedia, “Pajamas”, Etymology and Early English use. We haven’t opened the sources it cites. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pajamas
- Advertisement for pyjamas in Lisières Fleuries fabric, from Jardin des Modes, 1930. Wikimedia Commons, marked public domain. Commons file page
- Brysbaert, M., et al. “Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 51 (2019): 467–479. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9
- Kuperman, V., et al. “Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words”. Behavior Research Methods 44 (2012): 978–990. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0210-4
- Brysbaert, M., et al. “Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 46 (2014): 904–911. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5
- Warriner, A. B., et al. “Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 45 (2013): 1191–1207. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0314-x
- Lynott, D., et al. “The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms”. Behavior Research Methods 52 (2020): 1271–1291. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01316-z
- Brysbaert, M., and B. New. “Moving beyond Kučera and Francis”. Behavior Research Methods 41 (2009): 977–990. doi.org/10.3758/BRM.41.4.977
- Google Books Ngram Viewer, English 2019 corpus, 1700–2022, smoothing 3. Open the chart. Method: Michel, J.-B., et al. Science 331 (2011): 176–182.
Image and audio credits
Glossary page: Internet Archive scan of a public domain book. 1930 advertisement: Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Recording: Dvortygirl (US), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Map: Natural Earth, public domain.