Vaippa

Vaippa is a Finnish noun with several meanings. The most common sense in everyday language is a diaper worn by infants and toddlers to catch urine and feces. In colloquial speech, people refer to changing a baby’s vaippa, and both disposable and cloth diapers are described with this word. The term is widely used across Finnish-speaking regions and reflects standard parenting vocabulary.

In scientific contexts, vaippa refers to the mantle, an important anatomical region in mollusks such as snails, clams, and octopuses. The vaippa is a sheet of tissue that encloses the visceral mass and, in many species, secretes the calcareous or protein-based shell. It also forms a mantle cavity that contains gills or other respiratory structures. Across mollusk groups, the size, shape, and function of the vaippa can vary significantly; in shelled species it is closely involved in shell production, while in some cephalopods the mantle plays a major role in locomotion and respiration.

The dual use of vaippa—everyday diaper terminology and a technical term in malacology—makes it one of the more familiar polysemantic words in Finnish. In scientific literature, it is a standard term for mantle anatomy, while in parental and caregiving contexts it denotes a child’s diaper. The meaning is usually clear from context, but the two senses are distinct and rarely overlap.