disc▪ According to Jeffery1938, 102, ǧilbāb is »an article of women’s attire […] mentioned in the Qur’ān, though the Lexicons differ considerably as to the exact meaning (cf. LA, i, 265). – The difficulty of deriving the word from ǧalab‑ is of course obvious, and Nöldeke, Neue Beiträge, 53, recognized it as the Eth [Gz] gəlbāb, from galbaba ‘to cover’ or ‘cloak’, which is quite common in the oldest texts. It was apparently an early borrowing, for it occurs in the early poetry, e.g. Div. Hudh, xc, 12«. – This opinion is maintained also by DRS (1994) and Weninger2007: probably a pre-Islamic loan from Gz gəlbāb ‘covering, veil, wrapper’.
▪ According to DRS (1994), the Eth forms ultimately go back to a Sem *glb ‘skin, etc.’ (cf. Ar ↗ǧulbaẗ). DRS, glbb-2. The meanings ‘to cover, cloak’ and ‘garment’ would then be explicable as ‘to put on (s.th. like) a skin’.
In contrast, Huehnergard2011 (s.v. glb) holds that ǧilbāb, together with the dialectal ↗ǧallābaẗ‑ and ↗ǧallābiyyaẗ, ultimately, goes back to the vb. ↗ǧalab-‑ ‘to attract, bring, fetch, import’, which in turn can be traced back to a WSem *glb ‘to catch, fetch’. While ǧallāb(iyy)aẗ, according to Huehnergard, derives from ↗ǧallāb‑ and would thus originally have meant the dress of the a ‘(slave) trader, importer’, the author does not give details on the semantics of ǧilbāb.
▪ Yet another opinion is held by Marçais1956, who thinks that »the Old Arabic djilbāb ‘outer garment’« (which he, too, believes to be a foreign word) is prior to forms like ǧallābaẗ or ǧallābiyyaẗ; according to the author, it is not surprising that these should have developed from ǧilbāb by way of »dissimilative dropping« of the last b.