belt [OE] An Old English word that can be traced back to Latin balteus, ‘baldric, girdle’. It is unlawful for a boxer to land a punch below his opponent’s belt, and people often use the phrase below the belt [M19th] about a critical or unkind remark. If you take a belt and braces [M20th] approach to something you make doubly sure that nothing will go wrong. The reference is to someone so anxious that their trousers will fall down that they wear both. Belting, or hitting someone with a belt, is behind the mid-16th-century verb sense ‘to strike, hit’, and probably also the meaning ‘to move very fast’ [L19th]. In Middle English ‘to belt’ was used literally in the sense to put a belt on, either ‘to belt yourself’, put on a belt or, as in belted earl [E17th], of someone who has been knighted or given a rank. Belt up, or ‘be quiet’, seems to have started life as RAF slang, in the 1930s.