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I have just concluded a summer spent largely on a lake where the residents are lucky enough—and the houses are far enough away from each another—that it is not uncommon to start your day with a swim in the buff.

This feeling like a natural thing to do, I naturally wanted to look up the word buff.

Merriam-Webster holds 9 entries for the word while the Oxford English Dictionary shows 13.  Of course many of these entries contain multiple definitions.

• buff can mean “polish”
• it once meant “buffalo” the animal
• it can mean “an enthusiast” as in “I’m a word buff “; and of course
• it can mean “without any clothes on”

Most of these meanings are fairly old.  A newer meaning of buff is to be muscular and well built.

It turns out that all of the meanings I’ve mentioned here evolve from a single source.  They grew out of the name of an animal.

The word buffalo and its roots predate any European sightings of the animals that gave Buffalo Bill his name.

In fact those buffalos aren’t strictly buffalos as far as their species goes, they are bison.

Buffalo as a word can certainly be traced back to ancient Greek where it referred to a kind of antelope.  The American Heritage Dictionary points a vague finger further back at the same Indo-European roots that gave us beef.

From Greek it evolved through Latin and into French.  By the time buff got to English in the 1500s it had lost its trailing “–o”.

One of the useful things about the animals referred to—and their precise species seems to have changed fairly freely—is that as well as making a good meal, the provided leather.

Leather is useful in all kinds of ways and it makes sense that the skin of an animal might retain the name of the animal that provided it so buff also held a meaning of leather.

A piece of leather can be used to polish something and so the noun for the type of leather became a verb that you still use when you wax and buff your car.

Leather is great for making coats and jackets too and so a buff coat meant a “leather coat.”

At some time before 1600 somebody made the analogy that if you were naked it was as if you were in buff.

The thinking is that the color of the leather coats was light enough to resemble people’s skin color, as opposed to making the analogy that your personal skin was a hide just like those of the buffalo.

Surprisingly a buff who is “an enthusiast” comes from this same etymological source.  The first citation from the OED is from 1903 and refers to buffs who were volunteer fire fighters. They were called buffs because of the color of their protective gear, but they were thought to be enthusiastic about fires, and so to be enthusiastic about anything later made you a buff.

The physically fit buff is new enough that it’s hard to find a first citation.  It isn’t even mentioned in the OED yet.

Merriam-Webster does mention it and I get the sense that this meaning comes from the “polishing” or “enhancing” effect of body building.

Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang says that this sense of buff appeared in a 1993 movie called Sneakers.

The first time that we know of where someone admitted to being in the buff was in 1602.  It was a line from a play called Satiromastix by a guy named Thomas Dekker.

This was the heyday of Shakespeare and Dekker was also one of the London theater crowd.

These playwrights and actors were all scrambling to make a living and there was a fair amount of competition.  This play Satiromastix was actually written to ridicule another theatre guy of the time, Ben Johnson.  You can think of this as an early form of negative advertising.

Ben somehow got warning that the play was on its way and so wrote a counter-attack play called Poetaster.  He got it on stage before Dekker’s play and it was a big success, so his strategy worked.

It worked well enough that although I can find the complete text of Poetaster online, I can’t find the text of Satiromastix and so I can’t tell you who it was who was in the buff 400 years ago, or why.