Heavy-Duty Cotton Twill

      A commenter asked, "What's a dungaree, anyway?"

     It turns out that's quite a question.  The easy answer is that it's a heavy, hard-wearing, twill-woven cotton fabric, typically yarn-dyed -- a sibling to denim.

     The harder answer branches and twines.  About as soon as people figured out some things -- wool, cotton, flax, hemp (and so on) -- can be spun into threads and the threads woven into cloth, they started working out various ways to weave it.

     Canvas -- from an Anglo-French or Old French root -- is heavy-duty cloth in a plain over one, under one weave, and it was first made from hemp: cannabis in Greek, or cannapaceus in Vulgar Latin.  The Dutch turned out a really tight-woven version suitable for, oh, sails, and called it "canvas cloth," except the Dutch word is "doek," and there's your canvas duck.  "Cotton duck" is canvas without the hemp.  Canvas is heavy stuff, great for tents, bags, maybe capes.  But it's stiff.  It doesn't drape nicely, and it'll sandpaper your skin.

     There are flexible weaves that are still tight, like twill.  It's an old pattern, and there's no telling it if was invented to make a pretty design, move better, wear less -- or someone just lost count.  Humans like to fiddle, and as soon as we had looms and some free time, we started trying things.  Twill weave was probably invented more than once, and there are multiple patterns that count as "twill."  But it's ideal for clothes.  By the Middle Ages, the French were making a good twill, "sergé de Nîmes," which you and I know as denim.  In the 19th Century, Levi Strauss started using it for workwear after Gold Rush miners -- miners! -- complained the canvas he made jeans from was too rough on their hides.

     (Wait, what's "serge?"  It's a specific two up, two down twill weave that flows nicely and the word meant "silken."  And "jeans?"  Weavers in Genoa, Italy copied the French weavers of Nimes, right down to the blue dye: blue Genoa cloth became "blue jean" material.  The name went from the cloth to clothing -- and "denim jeans" is either redundant or a well-hedged bet.)

     The thing is, another people had beaten French (and Italian) weavers and San Francisco tailors to the idea: in India, they'd been spinning and weaving cotton* for centuries if not millennia (when Alexander the Great invaded India in 327 BC, his troops soon swapped their woolen clothes for comfortable local cotton), and their wardrobes tended more to folding than cutting and sewing.  Twill had long been woven in and around the city of Dongri, giving rise to the Marathi word dongrī for the cloth, Urdu dungrī and Hindi dũgrī  -- and, by the 1600s, the English word dungaree.  It was a short step from the name of the cloth to the workwear, and thus we get dungarees.  The Indian original was yarn-dyed, and so is the thread for the modern cloth.  Yes, it's likely that hard-wearing farm (etc.) clothes of radically different cut and design were made from essentially the same fabric; when the human race comes up with a good idea, it tends to spread, getting reimagined as it goes.
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* Of some note, when you see pictures of Gandhi quietly sitting on the floor, running a spinning wheel?  He's not engaging in a gentle pastime, he's being defiant.  The Raj was happy to use Indian cotton -- in their own mills, mostly in England, and to sell the cloth back to Indians at a nice profit.  Just like marching to the sea to boil out salt, they didn't want the Indians doing for themselves.  This policy...engendered resentment.  You'll notice the Raj isn't around any more -- and the Indians have a spinning wheel on their flag.