velvet [ME] Velvet is noted for its smoothness and softness. Latin villus, ‘tuft, down’, is the source of it and of velour [E18th]. An iron fist in a velvet glove, meaning ‘firmness or ruthlessness cloaked in outward gentleness’, has been current in English since the 1830s when it appeared as a saying of Napoleon’s. People gave the name velvet revolution to the relatively smooth change from Communism to a Western-style democracy in Czechoslovakia at the end of 1989. The similarly trouble-free division of that country into Slovakia and the Czech Republic in 1992 was the velvet divorce.