Fleece

How to spell fleece

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fleece

What does fleece mean?

1. nounThe woolly coat of a sheep, or a soft warm fabric or jacket resembling it.
2. verbTo cheat someone by charging them far too much money.

Fleece in a sentence

• noun

  The shearer removed the entire fleece in one smooth piece.

• verb

  Some airport taxis fleece visitors who do not know the fair price.

• noun

  She zipped up her fleece before the cold morning walk.

• verb

  The scheme was designed to fleece pensioners out of their savings.

Where does fleece come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Fleece comes straight from Old English fleos or flies, the word for the woolly coat that grows on a sheep, and it has stayed remarkably close to that ancient form ever since. It belongs to the broad Germanic family, with cousins such as the Dutch vlies and the German Vlies, all describing the same shorn covering of wool. For most of its life the word was purely a thing of farms and markets: the fleece was what a shearer removed in one piece and what a wool trader weighed and sold. By the 1500s it had also gained a sharp figurative verb sense, to strip someone of their money as cleanly as a shearer strips a sheep, which is why we still say a tourist trap can fleece its customers. The modern use for a soft synthetic jacket is much more recent, a twentieth century coining that borrowed the wool image for a warm, fuzzy fabric. The quiet trap in spelling it is the double e followed by ce: the sound is a long ee, but the ending is ce, not se.

How the word is built

• Single morpheme: fleece (from Old English fleos, the woolly coat of a sheep); no prefix or suffix, just the bare root