Names for the Bed Linen That Holds A Pillow

Grant, what do you call the cloth cover for a pillow? Oh, you mean the pillowcase, pillow slip.

Yeah, thank you. There’s two, and there’s others, but I don’t—there’s only two I know. Yeah, yeah, well.

There’s—and there’s also pillow beer or pillow bear, which is a really old word for that. Yeah, it it doesn’t have to do with bears.

And I wasn’t thinking about what’s the fancy outer covering.

So you have the pillow and then the pillowcase and then the thing that goes around that matches the bedspread.

What is that?

Yeah, some people call that a sham.

Sham.

A pillow sham.

Okay.

But the reason I bring that up is because I was at a dinner recently, and somebody was laughing about the term pillow slip, which I hadn’t heard in forever.

She was saying, oh, no, it’s pillowcase, pillowcase.

And it took me back to my childhood hearing my mother talk about pillow slips.

And so I went and looked it up, and it turns out that there are a lot more people who say pillowcase rather than pillow slip.

But pillow slip just—

Pilla.

Pilla.

Pilla slip.

Yeah.

I hear you’re Kentucky.

I am.

It’s interesting.

And then there’s no regionality to those terms?

Not really.

If you look in the Dictionary of American Regional English, which has a big map of all these things, there are a lot more pillowcases than pillow slips.

But it’s pretty widely distributed across the country, both of them.

Interesting.

Pillowcase, pillow slip.

I did not know that there was any argument about that.

We had one over dinner.

It was a lot of fun.

Oh, fun argument.

Not the serious kind.

Right.

Hit us up on Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.