Patchwork

How to spell patchwork

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce patchwork

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does patchwork mean?

1. nounCloth made by sewing together small pieces of different fabrics, or anything formed from varied, mismatched parts.
2. adjectiveMade up of an irregular assortment of different pieces or elements.

Patchwork in a sentence

• noun

  Her grandmother stitched a colourful patchwork from scraps of old shirts.

• adjective

  The country runs on a patchwork system of local taxes that varies by region.

• noun

  The new policy is a patchwork of rules borrowed from several departments.

• adjective

  She wore a patchwork jacket sewn from dozens of denim squares.

Where does patchwork come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a compound of two ordinary English words, patch and work. The word work comes straight from Old English weorc, meaning labour, action, or a thing that has been made, and it has stayed close to that meaning for over a thousand years. Patch is more mysterious: it appears in late Middle English around the 1300s for a small piece of material used to mend a hole, and its ultimate source is uncertain, though many scholars link it to an Old French dialect form pieche, a variant of piece. By the 1600s the two words had been joined to describe needlework in which small scraps of fabric are sewn together into one cloth, and from there the sense widened to mean anything assembled from mismatched parts. The spelling is reassuringly literal once you see it as two whole words locked together with no letters dropped, which is the simplest way to remember it.

How the word is built

• patch (a small piece of cloth used to mend)
• work (made or assembled thing, from Old English weorc)