Of vest and waistcoats rediviva

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'Pilot error', as they used to say in the engineering community when my hand slipped and something stopped working. Much of this post has disappeared – all except the update. Try again in a day or two.

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Update:2025.06.03.17:50 – Added PS

PS

Typical! There was I talking about AE usage, and the more I looked into it the wronger I got. COHA shows that 'vest' can be used to mean waistcost in AE and often does, but 'waistcoat' certainly exists. Until WWII it was relatively common, but since then its appearance has been fairly wan:

Graph showing AE usage of waistcoat

approximately aligned  – on my screen (but YMMV)–

with corpus data

Meanwhile, 'vest' is more than twice  as common:

                          

So 'vest' has been growing in popularity, with some of the increase attributable to its use as a synonym for 'waistcoat'.