Shopping malls take their name from the fashionable street now known as Pall Mall in London’s St. James area. The game of pall-mall, which involves hitting a ball with a wooden mallet, was once played there. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Fashionable Street”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. A listener named Danielle tweeted us a question the other day.
She wanted to know if it’s true that they call it the mall because you don’t go to one store, you go to the mall. Funny joke. Yeah, funny joke, and not an entirely unreasonable question, because there are some words in English that come to us by misdivision. In the strangest of ways.
Yeah, yeah, by misdivision, like apron used to be napron, and napron became apron.
But the mall did not come from them all.
No, there’s a park in London, right?
Yeah, yeah, an alley.
An alley, right.
So this is St. James Park, where they used to play a game called Paul Mall that involves a mallet.
So mall here is related to the word mallet.
And the Paul part referred to…
To the ball.
To the ball.
Yeah, it’s from Italian, pa la maglio.
So there was this place in this park that was a long lane or a row of trees, I guess, or an open space where you would play this game, Paul Mall.
Yeah, it was a long alley, actually.
And so the name of the game was transferred to the park.
It was abbreviated to the mall.
And when people started building these places intentionally where people might promenade or walk to be seen, they started calling them malls.
And thus, when we built these giant shopping centers in the United States, there we have it.
Yeah, yeah.
That’s great.
Isn’t it cool?
I love that the strange ways of history.
And who knew that the cigarette name had a backstory?
Yeah, and a weird pronunciation.
All I know about that is that it’s called the vulgar pronunciation.
Oh.
Pell-mel.
Pell-mel.
And is it related to Pell-mel, running Pell-mel?
No, that’s a different route.
There we go.
Yeah.
Well, thank you for your tweet, Danielle.
We really appreciate it.
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