Textile

How to spell textile

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce textile

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does textile mean?

1. nounA type of cloth or woven fabric, or the materials and fibres used to make it.
2. adjectiveRelating to the manufacture, weaving, or design of cloth and fabrics.

Textile in a sentence

• noun

  The museum displayed a rare textile from the sixteenth century.

• adjective

  The town once thrived on its textile industry and busy mills.

• noun

  She sourced organic cotton from a sustainable textile supplier.

• adjective

  He studied textile design at art college.

Where does textile come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin textilis, meaning 'woven' or 'that which is woven', which was built on the verb texere, 'to weave'. English adopted it in the early 1600s, at first chiefly as a noun for a woven cloth, and later also as an adjective for anything to do with weaving and fabric manufacture. The same texere root quietly underlies a whole family of common words: 'text' (originally the woven fabric of a piece of writing), 'context', 'texture', and even 'pretext'. Remembering that a textile is literally something woven, sharing its first four letters with 'text', helps fix the tricky middle: it is text- plus -ile, not -tex- or - til. The -ile ending is the same Latin suffix seen in 'fragile' and 'mobile', so the word divides cleanly as text-ile.

How the word is built

• text- (from Latin texere: to weave)
• -ile (suffix forming nouns and adjectives, here 'something woven')