Cotton

How to spell cotton

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cotton

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cotton mean?

1. nounA soft white fibre from the cotton plant, or the thread and cloth made from it.
2. verbTo begin to understand or take a liking to something, usually followed by 'on' or 'to'.

Cotton in a sentence

• noun

  The shirt was made from pure cotton and felt cool in summer.

• verb

  It took the new staff a while to cotton on to the filing system.

• noun

  She threaded the needle with a length of white cotton.

• verb

  Customers quickly cotton to the simpler checkout layout.

Where does cotton come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

Cotton comes from the Arabic word qutn (also written qutun), the name for the soft fibre that grows around the seeds of the cotton plant. As the trade in this fabric spread westward through the Mediterranean, the word travelled with it: Spanish picked it up as algodon (preserving the Arabic article al-) while other forms passed into Old French as coton, and it is from that French form that English borrowed it in the 1300s. The plant itself was prized in the Arab world and India long before it reached northern Europe, so the cloth and its name arrived together as exotic imports. The doubled t in the modern English spelling simply reflects the short, stressed first vowel; there is no hidden prefix or suffix to untangle, which makes it one of the more straightforward fabric names to spell. The same Arabic root sits behind the word for cotton in many European languages, a quiet reminder of how this everyday textile crossed continents.

How the word is built

• cotton (single root, no productive affixes; from Arabic qutn)