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Textured hair

Q: What is textured hair? And how do I say it in Albanian?

A: We don’t get many requests to translate English phrases into Albanian, but you came to the right place.

As it happens, we know a hair stylist of Albanian origin, so he not only speaks Albanian but he knows all about textured hair. (Pat was one of his clients a few years ago when we lived in Connecticut.)

“There are a few Albanian translations,” says the stylist, Sabit Vrzivoli. The most likely, he suggests, are flok te dredhura (wavy hair) or flok kacurrela (curly hair).

“ ‘Textured hair’ is the description of the curl pattern of the hair, like curly or wavy,” he says. “It’s defined by how tight the curl is. ‘Coarse’ or ‘fine’ describes the thickness or texture of the hair strand.”

The phrase “textured hair” is relatively new, since we haven’t found any published examples older than 1990. It apparently originated in the African-American press and was first associated with black styles, but it has since acquired wider usage in the hair-care industry.

Dictionaries are a bit behind the curve (or wave) on “textured hair.” There’s nothing about it in any of the 10 standard online dictionaries we regularly consult.

Even the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, has no entry for the phrase and no examples of its use. However, the OED does say that in today’s English, the adjective “textured” used without a preceding modifier means “provided with a texture, esp. as opposed to smooth or plain.”

So apparently “textured hair” simply means any hair that isn’t straight. And as the British hair stylist Vernon François has written, that definition takes in a lot of territory.

In a HuffPost UK article entitled “What Is Textured Hair?” (Dec. 9, 2016, updated Sept. 13, 2017), François says there’s been some confusion about the term.

“What I mean when talking about ‘textured hair’ is hair that has some kind of curl pattern to it,” he says. “Basically, hair that is not straight.” He adds that the phrase “is effectively an umbrella term, which can then be broken down into kinky, coily, curly and wavy.”

As we mentioned above, the phrase “textured hair”—with “textured” specifically meaning some degree of curly—is a relatively recent usage.

The oldest example we’ve found is from an African-American newspaper, the Indianapolis Recorder (June 30, 1990). Here the phrase is used adjectivally: “When you choose your new hair style, keep in mind that your hair is growing out of the relaxer. Try mini-braids or one of the new textured hair styles.”

In early use, as in these examples from the black press, the phrase was sometimes preceded by “Afro-” or “African”:

“Syreeta [Scott, a Philadelphia hair stylist] used Afro-kinky textured hair to create this look” (Essence, May 2003) … “cultural hair stylists who specialize in grooming African textured hair” (New York Amsterdam News, March 12, 1994) … “these processes have given women the ability to do more with their African textured hair” (Michigan Chronicle, Feb. 22, 1995) … “the special needs of melanin skin and textured hair” (Amsterdam News, Sept. 14, 1996).

But over time the phrase has become more universal, as in this example from the Washington Times, March 8, 2000, about new quarters issued by the US Mint: “The front of the quarter shows George Washington’s stony profile, as usual, but his head is shrunken a bit with more textured hair.”

A September 2016 article in Glamour (“5 Things Every Woman With Textured Hair Should Know”) quoted the New York hair stylist Mia Emilio: “Sixty-six percent of people have some texture in their hair. And the range of curls varies greatly, from wavy all the way to super curly.”

To return to Vernon François and his HuffPost article: “People from all walks of life, all countries, can and do have textured hair. The ‘textured hair community’ is a global one.”

Finally, let’s look at the origins of “textured,” a word that has its etymological roots in weaving. It ultimately comes from Latin, in which textūra means a weaving and texĕre means to weave.

The adjective has existed in written English for only about two centuries. The OED’s earliest citation is from 1888 (“light-textured homespuns”), but we’ve found many uses from earlier in the 19th century. We’ll cite just a couple:

“Thin chalky land, covered with a fine textured turf interspersed with wild thyme, small wild clover, and eyebright, is that which produces the finest wool” (a column of news from England published in a Sydney newspaper, the Australian, Feb. 10, 1825).

“Look in at the ‘Senior’ [a London men’s club], and the broad, coarse, weather-beaten, sail-cloth textured face of Sir John Ross will meet your glance” (an article in the Boston Atlas, reprinted in the Alexandria [VA] Gazette on Aug. 12, 1845).

The adjective was derived from the now obsolete verb “texture,” first recorded in the 17th-century when it meant to weave or to construct as if by weaving. The defunct verb, the OED says, came in turn from the noun “texture,” which meant “the process or art of weaving” when first recorded in the 1400s.

That original sense of the noun is long dead, but it lives on today in meanings that began to appear in the 16th and 17th centuries. This is why we speak of the “texture” of a work of literature, music, or fine art, or say it is “textured”—that is, composed of various strands as if woven.

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