Duck/duct tape used to jury-rig a repair to the fender of the Apollo 17 lunar rover. A photo of a rear wheel of the lunar rover with folded lunar maps replacing a portion of the fender and fastened with the tape. Astronaut Harrison Schmidt is seated in the rover.
30 September 2022
(This is a substantially updated and corrected version of the posting of 28 September.)
People often debate whether or not the adhesive cloth tape should be called duct tape or duck tape. The dictionary underneath Microsoft Word declares duck tape to be an error and suggests duct tape as a replacement, but you don’t have to submit to the tyranny of the software giant. Both are perfectly good terms, so use whichever you prefer, but which term was first used to describe the adhesive tape is uncertain; duct tape is attested a few years earlier, but the use of duck tape to refer to non-adhesive tape is significantly older and may have also had earlier unattested use for the adhesive variety.
The duct in duct tape clearly refers to its application in sealing heating and air-conditioning ductwork, but the origin of duck tape is uncertain. It is most likely an alteration of duct, with the / t / phoneme being dropped. There are claims that the name comes from its waterproof capabilities, but this would appear to be an after-the-fact explanation, ginned up to explain the term. Or the duck could refer to the cotton cloth backing to which adhesive was originally applied.
Duck is a term that was likely borrowed from the seventeenth-century Dutch doeck, meaning cloth. The word appears in two Dutch-English dictionaries written by Henry Hexham in 1647 and 1648. The 1647 one only translates English to Dutch and uses doeck in several entries. Here is the one for linnen:
fine linnen, Fijn lijnwaet, ofte fijn lijnwaet-doeck
[The hyphen comes at a line break, so it’s uncertain whether lijnwaet-doeck is an open or closed compound.]
The next year, Hexham published the complete English-Dutch/Dutch-English edition, which has these entries in the Dutch-English half:
Doeck, ofte doeck-laken, Linnen, or linnen cloath.
Doeck, Cloath.
The fact that the term only appears in the Dutch half of the dictionaries indicates the term was generally unfamiliar to English speakers when Hexham wrote his lexicons.
But the word did have some limited currency in English before Hexham published his dictionary. Duck appears in a 1640 table of import duties, referring to cloth imported from the Continent (the hinderlands):
Gutting and spruce canvas drillings pack, duck hinderlands, middle good headlock, Muscovy linnen, narrow, Hamburgh cloth, narrow, and Irish cloth, the C. ells, qt. six score 0[s] 1[d]
Over time, duck became a standard term in English for a type of cotton cloth. And we see the phrase duck tape by the end of the nineteenth century, although the earliest uses refer to non-adhesive strips of cloth. The following passage is from an article on women’s fashion in the New Orleans Daily Picayune of 8 February 1899:
An extremely stylish effect noticed upon many of the cloth suits was a trace buckle of silver, finished with a strap of the material. Another style, especially designed for driving, has its shoulders extended by supporters quite three inches deyond [sic] the normal line, while the coat trails softly in sacque fashion all around the figure. It makes a very odd, exclusive design. In the washable suits for later wear pique and duck tape take the lead, especially in white and dark blue.
Adhesive cloth tape started to appear in the early years of the twentieth century, but all the known instances of the phrase duck tape refer to the non-adhesive type, and by the start of World War II the phrase was most often used to refer to the strips of cloth upon which the slats of Venetian blinds were hung.
A commonly told story is that duck/duct tape as we know it today was created by the Johnson & Johnson company under contract to the US military during the war. Colored green, it was intended to provide a waterproof seal for ammunition boxes, but soldiers found all sorts of uses for it. It is true that Johnson & Johnson was contracted to provide waterproof adhesive tape to seal ammunition boxes, but whether or not this tape was the duck/duct tape that we know today is uncertain. Johnson & Johnson may have used one of their existing waterproof adhesive tapes, such as Utilitape, to fulfill the contract. The manufacturing records for that period are no longer available, and there are no recorded instances of duck tape being used to refer to adhesive tape during the World War II era.
But duck tape was used by the military to refer to the non-adhesive variety. There is this from the Augusta Chronicle of 17 February 1945:
Major Walsh said there are more than 300 different items used by the army made from cotton duck. Every branch of the army has developed its use for the material that are peculiar to that branch, like the cotton duck covers for smoke generators under the chemical warfare divisions or the duck tape employed by engineers to mark off mine fields.
(During my US Army service in the 1980s we referred to this particular variety, colored white, as “engineer’s tape.” The green, adhesive variety was popularly called “hundred-mile-an-hour tape” by us soldiers, presumably because it was believed to hold fast when traveling at that speed.)
After the war, cloth-backed adhesive tape found a new use in connecting sections heating and air-conditioning ductwork where it was dubbed duct tape. We see duct tape in use by the mid 1950s. From an advertisement in the Newark, New Jersey Sunday Star-Ledger of 18 September 1955:
“Furnace & Duct Tape,[”]
2” to 18” Width
And there is this advertisement for Sears from 12 March 1961 in the New Orleans Times-Picayune:
adhesive duct tape
Sears low price
2.98
Use for making leakproof jointing in both heating and cooling systems.
In contrast, the earliest unambiguous reference to adhesive duck tape that I have found is from an article about a life-sized, inflatable model of a whale in the Portland Oregonian of 25 July 1975:
A stray harpoon, perhaps? No, Pearce said, “tape separation” was to blame. The landlocked mammal’s 24 by 100 feet of plastic sheeting is girdled with 180 yards of aluminum duck tape, which “has the best adhesive quality we could find.”
I’ve found two earlier uses of duck tape that may be references to the tape we know today. The first is in an ad in the 12 October 1973 Reno Evening Gazette that reads:
the tape with a million uses
DUCK TAPE
great for just about any home mending or draft stopping job
This is clearly a reference to a kind of adhesive tape, but earlier the ad mentions “self adhesive plastic foam tape” with a peel-off backing. Whether or not this duck tape is the plastic-foam tape or the duck tape we know today is unclear.
The second is a use of duck tape in an ad for painting supplies that appeared in the Shreveport Times on 3 May 1974. This is most likely a reference to the adhesive cloth tape, but one cannot be sure.
As it stands now, when it comes to the adhesive tape, duct tape is the older term by about a decade, and duck appears to be a variation on duct. But there are much older uses of duck tape referring to non-adhesive strips of cloth, so further digging may turn up earlier uses of the adhesive variety. The story about duck tape being invented by Johnson & Johnson during World War II is true in part—the company did supply adhesive tape for sealing ammunition boxes—but there is no evidence that anyone called it duck tape at the time or even if it is the same product that we know today.
As to which one is the “correct” term, both have been with us for half a century and both are in common use, so which one you choose is a personal choice.
Sources:
“Army Duck Output Here Is Increased.” Augusta Chronicle (Georgia), 17 February 1945, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Entick, John. “The Scavage Table of Rates Inwards” (1640). A New and Accurate History and Survey of London, Westminster, Southwark, and Places Adjacent, vol. 2. London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1766, 167. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Erickson, Steve. “Students Create ‘Jaws’ in Whale-Size Version.” Oregonian (Portland), 25 July 1975, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Fowler, Jennifer (KRT News Service). “Stuck on Duct Tape.” Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey), 27 September 2000, 77. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Freeman, Jan. “Duct Tape/Duck Tape, One More Time.” Throw Grammar from the Train (blog), 29 June 2013.
———. “Tale of the Tape: Duck or Duct? A Sticky Question.” Boston Globe, 14 March 2010.
Gurowitz, Margaret. “The Woman Who Invented Duct Tape.” Kilmer House (Johnson & Johnson history blog), 21 June 2012.
“Heating Specialties” (advertisement). Sunday Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey), 18 September 1955, 58. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Hexham, Henry. A Copious English and Netherduytch Dictionarie. Rotterdam: Aernout Leers, 1647, sig. O7v, s.v. linnen. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
———. A Copious English and Netherduytch Dictionarie. Rotterdam: Aernout Leers, 1648, sig. F8v, s.v. doeck. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Lancashire, Ian, ed. Lexicons of Early Modern English, University of Toronto, 2021.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. duck, n.3; draft additions, August 2001, duck, n.3., duct, n.
Quinion, Michael. “Duct Tape.” World Wide Words, 29 June 2013.
“Sears” (advertisement). Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 12 March 1961, 3.16. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Stop That Cold!” (advertisement). Reno Evening Gazette (Nevada), 12 October 1973, 30. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
“TG&Y Family Centers” (advertisement). Shreveport Times (Louisiana), 3 May 1974. 13-A. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
“Women’s World and Works.” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 8 February 1899, 3. NewsBank.
Photo credit: Eugene A. Cernan/NASA, 12 December 1972. Public domain image.