cloth

noun

Etymology: From Middle English cloth, clath, from Old English clāþ (“cloth, clothes, covering, sail”), from Proto-Germanic *klaiþą (“garment”), perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *gleyt- (“to cling to, cleave, stick”) (compare Albanian ngjit (“to stick, attach, glue”)), a form of *gleh₁y- (“to smear; to stick”). Cognate with Scots clath (“cloth”), North Frisian klaid (“dress, garment”), Saterland Frisian Klood (“dress, apparel”), West Frisian kleed (“cloth, article of clothing”), Dutch kleed (“robe, dress”), Low German kleed (“dress, garment”), German Kleid (“gown, dress”), Danish klæde (“cloth, dress”), Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk klede, Swedish kläde (“cloth”), Icelandic klæði (“cloth, dressing”), Old English clīþan (“to adhere, stick”).

1. A fabric, usually made of woven, knitted, or felted fibres or filaments, such as used in dressing, decorating, cleaning or other practical use. Sometimes, woven fabric specifically.

   “Near-synonyms: (not always differentiated) fabric, material (fabric sense), textile; see also Thesaurus:fabric”

   “In trumpets for assisting the hearing, all reverbation of the trumpet must be avoided. It must be made thick, of the least elastic materials, and covered with cloth externally.”

2. Specifically, a tablecloth, especially as spread before a meal or removed afterwards.

   “One day he came, as I thought accidentally, to dinner. My huſband was very much engaged in buſineſs, and quitted the room ſoon after the cloth was removed.”

3. A piece of cloth used for a particular purpose.

   “The first room the people enter was formerly the Presence Chamber, which is hung completely with black, and at the r-end a cloth of estate, with a chair of estate standing upon the Haut-place under the state.”

   “The stole is a long scarf-like cloth that hangs around the neck, over the shoulders and down the front of bishops and priests [generally, two-four inches across].”

4. Substance or essence; the whole of something complex.

   “. If we look beyond the chaos of each moment, we cannot help seeing that we are but one glorious thread in the cloth of life.”

   “The disparate threads contained are, in the cloth of a religious society, ready to revolutionize the world and bring the Kingdom of Heaven into its full reality on earth.”

5. Appearance; seeming.

   “Like all cultural realities, contemporary modernism is packed with its own myths, its own largely unrecognized metaphors, its own poetics literally perceived -- or should we say, "misperceived"? -- its own reifications and idiosyncratic distinctions. And it comes to us decorated in the cloth of emancipation, a new freedom that would seem to liberate us from those restraints and bonds that were the excretions of an older mindset, an alien political and social order, a rigid and stultifying hierarchy now perceived as riddled with superstition, arbitrary premise, and false conjunction — in contrast, of course, to the liberated mindset that bespeaks our own age!”

   “Unbelievably, he smiled through his cracked and bleeding lips. A horrible nightmare cloaked in the cloth of good.”

6. A form of attire that represents a particular profession or status.

   “But he could not come in the white cloth of celebration to a burial service, and he could hardly come in the cloth of mourning to celebrate his two decades on the stool.”

   “Wearing the cloth of kings would seem to be an appropriate symbol.”

7. The priesthood.

   “He is a respected man of the cloth.”

   “As someone who finds clear shouts of lively encouragement easier to identify than the “still small voice of calm”, like the prairie rodent I scurried off to various members of the cloth to ask how they ascertained their calling.”