Other forms: materials
In chess, material is the pieces each side has, counted by value. A queen is worth nine pawns, and being a knight up is being up on material.
Players talk about winning material, losing material, and sacrificing material for an attack, which means giving pieces away on purpose to get something better. Away from the board the word has two large everyday senses. Material is the stuff a thing is made of — building materials, raw material — and it is also cloth, so a dressmaker buys material by the metre. As an adjective it means physical rather than spiritual, and in law a material fact is one important enough to change the outcome.
1nounmaterialIn chess, the pieces a player has, weighed by value.~2%
“He was a pawn up in material but badly placed.”
2nounsubstanceThe substance something is made from.~80%
“The material is heavier than it looks.”
3nounclothCloth or fabric.~16%
“She bought three metres of material.”
4adjectiveimportantImportant enough to affect the outcome.~2%
“That is a material change to the contract.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Material comes from Latin māteria, which meant wood or substance, and that in turn from māter, mother. The stuff a thing is made of was thought of as what mothered it.
Latin
māteriālis
Middle English
material
English, today
material
Built from
From Middle English material, from Latin māteriālis, from Latin māteria (“wood, material, substance”), from māter (“mother”). Displaced native andweorc (from andweorc). a doublet of materiel.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA