Paisley

How to spell paisley

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce paisley

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does paisley mean?

1. nounA textile pattern of curving, teardrop-shaped figures, or a fabric printed with it.

Paisley in a sentence

• He wore a silk tie covered in a deep red paisley.

• The curtains in the study featured a swirling green paisley.

Where does paisley come from?

Language of origin: Celtic

This is one of the words that started life as a place name. Paisley is a town in the west of Scotland, and during the early nineteenth century its weavers became famous for mass-producing soft woollen shawls covered in a distinctive curving teardrop motif. The motif itself was far older and far away in origin: it is the Persian and Indian 'boteh' or 'buta' design, a stylised droplet often linked to a cypress tree or a flowering plant, which reached Britain on imported Kashmir shawls. Because the Scottish town supplied so much of the cheaper imitation cloth, the pattern came to be called simply 'paisley', and by the later 1800s the word was used for the design wherever it appeared. The town's own name is much older and somewhat uncertain, possibly from a Brittonic Celtic word or from Latin 'basilica' meaning a church. The handy spelling trap is that the 'ai' sounds like a long 'a' and the silent middle keeps it looking like the Scottish surname rather than a phonetic spelling.

How the word is built

• Paisley (the Scottish town that mass-produced the patterned shawls) used as a common noun; no prefix or suffix, the name itself became the word