Plimsoll shoe

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For the American rock band, see The Plimsouls.

Look up plimsoll in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Converse All-Star canvas shoes.

Traditional school plimsolls with elastic instead of laces.

A small-sized plimsoll with a tartan design, using a CVO (Circular Vamp Oxford) design/style.

A plimsoll shoe, plimsoll or plimsole (British English; see other names below) is a type of athletic shoe with a canvas upper and rubber sole developed as beachwear in the 1830s by the Liverpool Rubber Company.

The shoe was originally, and often still is in parts of the United Kingdom, called a 'sand shoe' and acquired the nickname 'plimsoll' in the 1870s. This name derived, according to Nicholette Jones' book The Plimsoll Sensation, because the coloured horizontal band joining the upper to the sole resembled the Plimsoll line on a ship's hull, or because, just like the Plimsoll line on a ship, if water got above the line of the rubber sole, the wearer would get wet.^[1]

In the UK plimsolls were compulsory in schools' physical education lessons. Regional terms are common: in Northern Ireland and central Scotland they are sometimes known as gutties; "sannies" (from 'sand shoe') is also used in Scotland as is the term 'Two boab sliders'.^[2] In parts of the West Country and Wales they are known as "daps" or "dappers". In London, the home counties, much of the West Midlands, and north west of England they are known as "pumps".^[3] There is a widespread belief that "daps" is taken from a factory sign - "Dunlop Athletic Plimsoles" which was called "the DAP factory". However, this seems unlikely as the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary of "dap" for a rubber soled shoe is a March 1924 use in the Western Daily Press newspaper; Dunlop did not acquire the Liverpool Rubber Company (as part of the merger with the Macintosh group of companies) until 1925.

As it was commonly used for corporal punishment in the British Commonwealth, where it was the typical gym shoe (part of the school uniform), plimsolling is also a synonym for a slippering.

In the British TV series Doctor Who, the Tenth Doctor (played by David Tennant) was known for wearing these shoes, earning him the nickname "Sandshoes" from his other incarnations in the episode The Day of the Doctor.

Outside the United Kingdom

Australia - sandshoe or more simply with teenagers "canvas shoe", and include the similar shoe, the Dunlop Volley.^[4]
India - white plimsolls are often worn by school children and are known as Keds dating from the 1970s and earlier, and more commonly, as "canvas shoes". The brown version is used by most police and military units as a gym training shoe.
Ireland - also called rubber dollies, especially in County Cork.
United States - sneakers, tennis shoes, or Chucks.
Canada - also called running shoes, or runners.
South Africa - South African slang for shoes with a canvas upper and rubber sole is takkies.

References

↑ "99% Invisible, Episode 33- A Cheer for Samuel Plimsoll".
↑ "sannies - Dictionary of Playground Slang (Online)". www.odps.org. Retrieved 2010-01-19.
↑ "BBC Word Map - enter What they wear and Child's soft shoes". www.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 2011-09-27.
↑ "Sneaker pimps". The Sydney Morning Herald. 2005-06-21.

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