Etymology

Uncertain. Often considered to be from a Vulgar Latin root *subfollicāre, from Latin follis ‎(“bellows”), but there are semantic and phonetic difficulties here; compare înfuleca. Alternatively, and perhaps more likely, from supplicāre, present active infinitive of supplicō, which fits the meaning more closely if one were to take the literal sense of "fold under" (as opposed to the more common one of "to supplicate, beseech"). In this case, the transition from 'pl' to 'fl' is not the normal phonetic shift in Romanian; however, this may be explained by the possibility that the variant now found mostly in Moldova, supleca or suplica, was the original form (it was attested in the 17th century writings of Dosoftei), and the now-standard form was the result of a relatively modern alteration, by analogy (the Oltenian variant forms suvelca, zuvelca were influenced by zavelcă ‎(“apron”), for example). The Transylvanian form suvulca may be originally derived from a Vulgar Latin *subvolvicāre and later conflated with this verb.^[1] Cf. also the neologism suplica ‎(“to supplicate, beg”), which may be a doublet if this etymology is correct.