Mat

How to spell mat

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mat

What does mat mean?

1. nounA small piece of coarse or padded material placed on a surface, often to wipe shoes, protect a floor, or cushion something.
2. verbTo tangle or press fibres, hair, or threads into a thick knotted mass.

Mat in a sentence

• noun

  She wiped her muddy boots on the mat by the front door.

• verb

  Neglecting to brush the dog will quickly mat its coat.

• noun

  The gym instructor handed each member a foam mat for the stretching session.

• verb

  Damp wool can mat into a dense felt if it is washed too vigorously.

Where does mat come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word goes back to the Old English meatte, which was itself an early borrowing from the Late Latin matta, meaning a mat or covering woven from rushes or reeds. The Latin term is widely believed to have come in turn from a Semitic source, possibly the Hebrew mittah, meaning a bed or couch, since such woven rush coverings were used as simple bedding in the ancient Mediterranean world. From the sense of a coarse woven floor covering, English gradually extended the word to all sorts of protective pads and surface coverings, and eventually to the figurative idea of a thick tangled mass, as when hair or fibres become matted together. The spelling stayed reassuringly short and phonetic, a plain three-letter word with a single t, which is why the chief risk is doubling the t by analogy with related forms like matted and matting. It is one of the oldest and simplest household words in English, unchanged in its core shape for over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• mat (single root, no affixes; from Old English meatte)

Words that sound like mat

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• matte: Having a dull, flat surface that does not reflect light or appear glossy.