paraphernalia [M17] Until the Married Women’s Property Acts in the late 19th century a husband became the owner of all his wife’s property when the couple married. A partial exception to this was her purely personal belongings such as clothes and jewellery, which she could keep after her husband’s death. These were her paraphernalia—the word derives from Greek parapherna ‘property apart from a dowry’. Outside the strict confines of the law, the word came to refer to a person’s bits and pieces, and then to the items needed for or associated with a particular activity in the mid 18th century.