mat

UK/mæt/US/mæt/

nounA2+Common in everyday speech and writing · #4,477 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: mats

A mat is a small flat piece of thick material laid on the floor. Often by a door, for wiping your shoes.

English has one for every purpose: a doormat, a bath mat, a beer mat under a glass, a yoga mat, and the mat a wrestler is thrown onto. Being a doormat is an insult meaning somebody who lets others walk over them. The word is short and old. Take care with matt, meaning not shiny, which is a different word spelled with two t's in British English.

Definitions of mat

1nounmatA small piece of thick material laid on a floor or surface.A2+
“Wipe your feet on the mat.”

Where it comes from

Middle English
matte
English, today
mat

From Middle English matte. Middle English matte (“mat”), from Old English meatte (“mat”), from Latin matta (“mat made of rushes”), from xpu - or phn - (compare Hebrew מיטה (“bed, couch”)). Cognate with German Matte (“mat”), Danish måtte (“mat”), Faroese - and Icelandic motta (“rug, mat”), Norwegian matte (“mat, rug”), Swedish matta (“carpet, rug, mat”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Around the House, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 15 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

mat in the wild

Tatami are soft mats used as flooring material in traditional Japanese-style rooms.
Tatami
A mat is a hard or soft floor covering that generally is placed on a floor or other flat surface.
Mat
In both styles, the ultimate goal is to throw and pin the opponent to the mat, which results in an immediate win.
Freestyle wrestling
A microbial mat is a multi-layered sheet or biofilm of microbial colonies, composed of mainly bacteria and/or archaea.
Microbial mat
In many cases some of the bacteria form tangled webs of filaments which make the mat tougher.
Microbial mat

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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mat