What is the etymology of scissors?
Scissors comes to us via French and Italian from the Latin word cisoria (plural of cisorium) ‘cutting instrument’. When the word moved into Middle English, it was written sisours, sisoures, or cysowres. The spelling with sc, first found in the 16th century, may have happened when the word’s etymology was confused with Latin scissor ‘tailor’ which comes from scindere ‘to cut, split, rend’. Its true etymology is related to Latin excisus and excidere ‘to cut out’.
