Cloth

How to spell cloth

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cloth

What does cloth mean?

1. nounWoven or felted material, or a piece of it used for a particular purpose.

Cloth in a sentence

• She wiped the spilled coffee with a damp cloth.

• The tailor measured out a metre of fine wool cloth.

Where does cloth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Cloth comes straight from the Old English word clath, which meant a piece of woven or felted fabric and could also mean a garment. It belongs to a wider Germanic family, with close relatives such as the Dutch kleed and the German Kleid, meaning 'dress' or 'garment', though the deeper origin beyond Germanic is genuinely obscure. Over the centuries English split this single root into a useful pair: the noun cloth, which keeps the short vowel and the simple -th ending, and the verb clothe, which gained a silent -e and a softer voiced sound. That spelling fork is the main trap, since writers often add an unneeded -e to the noun by analogy with clothe and clothes. Remember that cloth, the material, ends plainly in -th, while clothe, the action of dressing, takes the extra e.

How the word is built

• cloth (from Old English clath: woven fabric)