Wool

How to spell wool

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wool

What does wool mean?

1. nounThe soft, curly fibre that forms the coat of sheep and some other animals, spun into yarn or woven into fabric.

Wool in a sentence

• She knitted the scarf from thick grey wool.

• The jumper is made of pure merino wool.

Where does wool come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Wool comes straight from Old English 'wull', the name for the soft fibrous coat of sheep and similar animals. That word descends from a common Germanic ancestor reconstructed as 'wullo', which is in turn linked to a much older Indo-European root meaning roughly 'covering of hair' or 'fleece'; the same ancient root gave Latin 'lana' and the related English word 'lanolin', the grease found in raw fleece. Because it is a deeply native English word it never picked up the silent letters or foreign clusters that trip people up; the only mild surprise is the double 'o' and double 'l'. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for more than a thousand years, shifting only slightly from 'wull' to the modern 'wool'. It has long carried figurative uses too, as in 'pull the wool over someone's eyes', which dates from the days when a woollen wig might literally be tugged down.

How the word is built

• wool (a single native root noun; no prefix or suffix)