Houndstooth is a broken check pattern of small jagged shapes. A houndstooth jacket.
The shapes look like pointed teeth, which is where the name comes from. Houndstooth is woven rather than printed, so the pattern goes right through the cloth.
1nounhoundstoothA broken check pattern of small jagged shapes.
“The houndstooth coat had belonged to his grandfather.”
houndstooth is a pattern.
Hound plus tooth, from the jagged shapes; the modern name dates from the 1930s though the weave is ancient.
Middle English
hound
English
hound
English, today
houndstooth
From hound + -s- + tooth, from its appearance. Although the pattern itself is archaeologically found from time immemorial, the modern term is 1936. hound comes from Middle English hound. a doublet of canine. Cognate with Dutch hond (“dog”), German Hund (“dog”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish hund (“dog”), Faroese and Icelandic hundur (“dog”). In 14th-century England, hound was the general word for all domestic canines, and dog referred to a subtype resembling the modern mastiff and bulldog (much as the distinction between Hund and Dogge in contemporary German). By the 16th century, dog had become the general word, and hound had begun to refer only to breeds used for hunting.[https://books.google.com/?id=u
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA