Other forms: pillows
A pillow is the soft thing your head rests on in bed. A soft pillow, plump the pillow, pillow talk.
The right height depends on how you sleep: side sleepers need a thicker one to keep the neck straight and front sleepers barely need one at all. Pillow talk is what is said in bed, and the phrase carries a suggestion of indiscretion. Note that the Latin behind it means cushion, from a word for dust — the old filling.
1nounpillowThe soft thing your head rests on in bed.
“He was so tired that he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.”
pillow is a bedding item.
Old English pyle comes from Latin pulvinus, a cushion, itself from pulvis, dust, for what a pillow was stuffed with.
Latin
pulvīnus — cushion
Proto-West Germanic
*pulwī — pillow
Old English
pyle
Middle English
pilwe
English, today
pillow
Built from
From Middle English pilwe, from Old English pyle, pylu (“pillow”), from Proto-West Germanic pulwī (“pillow”), from Latin pulvīnus (“cushion”), derived from pulvis (“dust”), for the filler of a pillow. a doublet of pulvinus. Cognate with stq Peel (“pillow”), gsw Pfulme (“pillow”), Dutch peluw (“a long, narrow pillow”), German Pfühl (“a big and soft pillow”), German Low German Pöhl (“pad, pillow, cushion”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA