shampoo

Vigorous hair-washing was not something people engaged in too frequently 150 or so years ago, at least in America and Britain, so it is not too surprising that the word shampoo in its current meaning is only about that old. The earlier meaning of shampoo was “massage.” The word (as well as the practice of massaging) became familiar to English people when they traveled to India in the 1600s and 1700s. Shampoo is probably borrowed from a word in Hindi, a major language of India: cāmpō, the command form of cāmpnā, “to press, squeeze.”