Other forms: blankets
A blanket is the warm cover you pull over yourself in bed. Wool or fleece, and heavier than a sheet.
It differs from a duvet, which is filled, and from a quilt, which is stitched in layers. The word spread to anything that covers evenly, so a blanket of snow and a blanket of fog are both standard. From there it became an adjective meaning applying to everything without exception, as in a blanket ban or blanket coverage. There is also the wet blanket, meaning a person who dampens everybody else's enjoyment.
1nounblanketA large piece of woollen or similar material used as a bed covering.
“She pulled the blanket up to her chin.”
2adjectiveapplyingApplying to all cases without exception.
“They imposed a blanket ban on parking.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: duvet
A blanket is a white thing. Old French blancet was white woollen cloth, a diminutive of blanc, white, so the word named the colour of the cloth rather than the job it did.
Old English
hwītel — blanket; cloak, mantle
Middle English
blanket
English, today
blanket
Built from
Middle English blanket, blonket, blaunket, from fro-nor - blanket, blancet (“white horse", also "white woollen cloth or flannel; a type of jacket”) literally “that which is white” (whence Modern French blanchet), diminutive of blanc (“white”), of gem - origin (compare Old English blanca (“white horse”); see more at blank). Furthermore, the sense "white woollen cloth" is likely a Old English hwītel (“blanket; cloak, mantle”), from hwīt (“white”) + -el. Compare also Old Norse hvítill (“a white bed-cover, sheet”), Norwegian kvitel (“blanket”). Compare also blunket, plunket. Displaced native whytel, from hwītel (whence Modern whittle (“blanket, cloak, shawl”)).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA