gauze

UK/ɡɔːz/US/ɡɔːz/

nounB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,015 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: gauzes

Gauze is thin transparent fabric, most familiar as the material of a wound dressing. Loosely woven, so air gets through.

Medicine is where most people meet it, and a gauze pad is the standard covering for a cut. The looseness is the point, since a wound needs to breathe. The word also covers thin fabric in dressmaking and theatre, where a gauze is a semi-transparent curtain that appears solid until you light behind it. Wire gauze is a fine metal mesh used in laboratories.

Definitions of gauze

1noungauzeA thin loosely woven fabric used for dressings.B2
“She covered the cut with a square of gauze.”

Where it comes from

Arabic
قَزّ — silk
French
gaze
English, today
gauze

French gaze, from Arabic قَزّ (“silk”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, A Song of Ice and Fire

First appears in chapter 8 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

gauze in the wild

In American English, the word bandage is often used to indicate a small gauze dressing attached to an adhesive bandage.
Bandage
Point de Gaze (sometimes Point de Gauze) is a needle lace from Belgium named for the gauze-like appearance of the mesh ground.
Point de Gaze
Wire gauze or wire mesh is a gauze woven of metal wire, or very fine, gauze-like wire netting.
Wire gauze
Glassware should not be heated directly by the flame of a Bunsen or other gas burner; wire gauze diffuses the heat and protects the glassware.
Wire gauze
The materials used in the manufacturing of gauze sponges for medical purposes include cotton and non-woven materials.
Gauze sponge

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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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