cotton

UK/ˈkɒt.n̩/US/ˈkɑt.n̩/

nounB1Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,934 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: cottons

Cotton is the soft natural material from a plant that most T-shirts are made of. Pure cotton, a cotton shirt, cotton fields.

It is the seed fibre of the plant, and it breathes well and holds water badly — which is why it is comfortable in heat and dangerous when wet and cold. It is a thirsty crop, and its history is bound up with slavery and with the mills of the industrial revolution. Note to cotton on, meaning to understand.

Definitions of cotton

1nouncottonThe soft natural fibre from the cotton plant.B1
“This shirt is made of cotton, so it's cool to wear in summer.”

cotton is a fibre.

Where it comes from

Old French coton comes through Italian from Arabic qutn. The word travelled with the trade.

Hebrew
כֻּתֹּנֶת
Arabic
قُطُن
roa-oit
cotone
Old French
coton
Anglo-Norman
cotun
Middle English
cotoun
English, today
cotton

From Middle English cotoun, from Anglo-Norman cotun, Old French coton, from (Genoese) roa-oit cotone, from Arabic قُطُن, from Hebrew כֻּתֹּנֶת (kuttṓnĕṯ).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Clothes & Fashion

Practise this word

cotton in the wild

A modern mechanical cotton gin was created by American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793 and patented in 1794.
Cotton gin
So, as cotton farmers expanded their plantations, they bought more slaves to pick the cotton.
Cotton gin
Linen is very strong and absorbent and dries faster than cotton.
Linen
Linen is often marketed as a more eco-friendly alternative to synthetic fibers or water-intensive fibers like cotton.
Linen
Limited companies were developed to construct mills, and together with the business of the trading floors of the cotton exchange in Manchester, a vast commercial city developed.
Cotton mill

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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