When the term duffel was first documented in 1649 records from the colony of Connecticut, it was spelled duffle and referred to a type of woolen fabric. By the mid-nineteenth century, this term was expanded to include the type of coat made from this material and “camping materials” that were typically associated with it. Eventually, the modern sense of “duffel bag” emerged in the 1930s. Prior to this time, the term was spelled as both duffel and duffle with equal frequency, but duffle began to be the more commonly used spelling, although both forms are considered correct. The word originates from Duffel, the name of a town in Belgium where the fabric was originally marketed. This name was documented in Middle Dutch as Duffla and may be a combination of the Gaulish word for “water”, dubrum, and the Latin word for “place”, locus.
