pareo

A pāreu or pareo is a wraparound skirt worn on Tahiti or other Pacific islands. The term was originally used only for women's skirts, as men wore a loincloth, called a maro. Nowadays the term is used for any cloth worn wrapped around the body by men and women. The pareo is related to the Malay sarong, Filipino malong, tapis and patadyong, Samoan lavalava, Tongan tupenu and other such garments of the Pacific islands. Name In contemporary Tahitian the garment is called pāreu (singular: te pāreu, plural: te mau pāreu), with the pronunciation of the word with a long a (hold the sound for two beats rather than just one) and the e and u pronounced separately, rather than slurred into a diphthong: [pɑːreu]. It is not clear where the variant pareo comes from. It might be an old dialectic variant or an early explorers' misinterpretation. But both terms were already used in the 19th century (the Dutch geographic magazine De Aarde en haar Volken of 1887 had a few South-seas articles, some of them using pāreu, others pareo). Nowadays, however, pareo can be considered as the English-language form of the word (plural pareos), much less likely subject to mispronunciation.