So What’s Epal?

Five Classifications of Epal
Five Classifications of Epal

I was about to re-share a photo posted by When In Manila on Facebook, when a friend of mine here in the US saw it. The image had everything written English, except for one word, which was Epal. I had to explain it and gave the etymology of the word. And I decided to blog about it’s etymology.

What is Epal?

Filipinos have this weird way of turning some words into Filipino slang words by flipping the order of syllables, or flipping the order of sounds, or flipping the order of some letters or all letters. Where that method of creating slang words came from,  I don’t know.

Looking at the word epal, this originally started with the Tagalog word for paper, which is papel. When you flip the two vowels, it turns into pepal, and after saying it over and over by various people, for some reason, the first “p” got dropped and turned into epal.

So What if Epal means Paper?

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