Motley

How to spell motley

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce motley

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does motley mean?

1. adjectiveMade up of a varied, incongruous, and often clashing mixture of people or things.
2. nounThe multicoloured costume traditionally worn by a court jester or fool.

Motley in a sentence

• adjective

  The volunteers were a motley collection of retirees, students, and off-duty nurses.

• noun

  The actor playing the fool wore the bright motley for every performance.

• adjective

  His garage held a motley assortment of tools, paint tins, and broken furniture.

• noun

  In the painting the court jester is dressed in patched motley and a belled cap.

Where does motley come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Motley first appears in Middle English in the late 1300s, and its exact roots are genuinely uncertain. The leading guess connects it to the Old English mot, meaning a speck, spot, or 'mote' of dust, so that something motley was originally flecked or dotted with mixed colours. By the time of Chaucer it described cloth woven from threads of many shades, and that diversely coloured fabric became the trademark costume of the licensed court jester or fool. From the fool's particoloured coat the word broadened into the modern figurative sense of any oddly assorted, mismatched group. Because the origin is hazy and the spelling does not follow an obvious Latin or French pattern, learners often stumble over the silent-looking -tley cluster; remembering 'mot' plus the adjective ending '-ley' helps fix it.

How the word is built

• motl- (Middle English, of uncertain origin, perhaps from mot 'speck, mote')
• -ey (adjective ending)