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Tanga, Thong, Fio Dental
English really only has one everyday word for it: thong — and even that word moonlights as "flip-flop" in Australia and parts of the US, which is its own small mess. Most of the rest of the world converged on something else instead: physical, often funny, always specific descriptions of what the garment actually looks or feels like. A cloth. A string. A slingshot. Dental floss. Here's what people actually call it, and why.
Thongs are a genuinely global category, worn under a dozen different names, and we carry a proper range — from £9 essentials to premium PUMP! styles. This guide is about the words, not our sales figures: where they came from, what they literally mean, and why English ended up with the least imaginative one of the lot.
Where "tanga" actually comes from
"Tanga" is Portuguese, but it isn't originally European at all — it comes from the Kimbundu words tanga/ntanga, from Central Africa, meaning "coarse cloth" or "loincloth." English first recorded the word in 1598, describing loincloths worn by indigenous peoples in tropical America. The modern underwear sense — the minimal style sold today — only dates from the 1970s. From Portuguese, the word spread into Spanish, Italian, German and Turkish more or less unchanged, making it one of the most widely shared clothing words in the world.
Brazil took a completely different, far blunter route: the most minimal style is often called fio dental — literally "dental floss." No metaphor, no borrowing, just a direct description of how little fabric is involved.
A world tour of the same idea
Once you look past English, almost nobody named this garment after a shape the way "thong" does (it's from Old English þweng, a leather cord). Instead, most languages reached for a vivid, physical comparison — and they didn't all reach for the same one:
Group them and a pattern falls out: a cluster of countries named it after the string (France, Israel, Iran, Turkey), a cluster named it after the shape it makes at the back (Japan, China, South Korea all independently landed on "T"), and a couple just described it bluntly (Brazil's dental floss, Bulgaria's slingshot, the Spanish-speaking "butt-less"). English is almost alone in naming it after the strap that was never really the point.
Sources: Thong (underwear), Wikipedia; Oxford English Dictionary. Search-behaviour figures referenced elsewhere in our research (e.g. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, pulled July 2026) don't always match the "proper" native word above — Turkish searchers, for instance, type "tanga" far more often than the native ipli külot, since the loanword has become the more common everyday search term even where a native word already exists.
Why "thong" itself is a slightly confusing word
Even within English, "thong" carries baggage "tanga" never had to. In Australian English, and in some American usage, "thongs" means flip-flop sandals, not underwear at all — so anyone searching or saying the bare word "thong" in those countries could mean either. It's a rare case where the supposedly "plain English" word is actually the more ambiguous one, and the "foreign" alternatives are all, in their own way, more precise.
Shop the range
Whatever you call it, here's what we actually stock — from £9 essentials to premium PUMP! styles:
