Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

mattress

UK/ˈmætɹɪs/US/ˈmætɹɪs/
nounB1Common in everyday speech and writing · #3,160 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: mattresses

A mattress is the big soft part of a bed that you actually lie on. A firm mattress, turn the mattress, memory foam mattress.

Firmness is personal and the marketing around it is largely noise, though the evidence favours medium-firm for most people with back pain. Turning it evens the wear. The word came into English from Arabic, from a word meaning a place where something is thrown — the Crusaders met the idea of sleeping on cushions.

Yahquinn · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of mattress

  1. 1nounmattressThe soft padded part of a bed.B1

    “This mattress is too soft, and I wake up with a sore back.”

mattress is a bed part.

Where it comes from

Old French matras comes from Arabic matrah, a place where something is thrown, from taraha, to throw.

  1. Middle English

    materas

  2. English, today

    mattress

Built from

  • طَرَحَ · Arabic — to throw

From Middle English materas. From Middle English materas, from Old French matras, from Arabic مَطْرَح (“place where something is thrown”), from طَرَحَ (“to throw”). Compare divan, from Persian via Turkish (both of Middle Eastern origin, due to the local custom of lying on padding on floor being foreign to Europeans).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Around the House

Practise this word

mattress in the wild

  • An air mattress or airbed is a type of mattress that uses air as its primary support system.

    Air mattress

  • Kapok is a common mattress material in Southeast Asia, and coir in South Asia.

    Mattress

  • Standard bed sizes are based on mattress dimensions, which vary from country to country.

    Bed size

  • In American English, the word bedding generally does not include the mattress, while in British English it often does.

    Bedding

  • Many beds include a box spring inner-sprung base, which is a large mattress-sized box containing wood and springs that provide additional support and suspension for the mattress.

    Bed

1 / 3

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.