Other forms: sheets
A sheet is the big flat piece of cloth you spread over a mattress and lie on. You strip the sheets on a Sunday, fight the fitted one over the fourth corner, and get into a bed that smells of washing powder.
The other everyday sheet is paper: a sheet of A4, a blank sheet, a sheet of stamps. From there it stretches to any thin flat piece of material — a sheet of glass, a sheet of ice across the pavement, corrugated sheet metal. Rain comes down in sheets, and fire can travel in a sheet along a wall. On a boat the word is a trap: a sheet is not the sail but the rope that controls it, which is where three sheets to the wind comes from. Music printed on paper is sheet music, and a spreadsheet keeps the paper idea alive on a screen.
1nounsheetA large rectangle of thin cloth used to cover a bed.~2%
“He changed the sheets and opened the window wide.”
synonyms: bedsheet
2nounsingleA single flat piece of paper.~66%
“She tore a sheet out of the notebook and drew a map on it.”
3nounmaterialA thin flat piece of any material, or a wide moving mass of something.~30%
“A sheet of ice covered the top three steps.”
4nounropeA rope used to control the angle of a sail.~2%
“He let the sheet out a little and the boat settled.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
sheet is a piece of bed linen.
Also accepted in games: sheets
Two Old English words got tangled together here. Sċīete was a piece of linen cloth, and that gives the thing on your bed. Sċēat and sċēata meant a corner or an angle — including the lower corner of a sail, and then the rope tied to it — and that gives the sailor's sheet. Both come from Proto-Germanic skautaz, "corner, wedge, lap", so the oldest idea in the word is a corner of cloth rather than a flat surface.
Old English
sċīete — a sheet, a piece of linen cloth
Middle English
schete
English, today
sheet
Built from
From Middle English schete; partly from Old English sċīete (“a sheet, a piece of linen cloth”); partly from Old English sċēata (“a corner, angle; the lower corner of a sail, sheet”); and Old English sċēat (“a corner, angle”); all from Proto-Germanic skautijǭ, skautaz (“corner, wedge, lap”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)kewd- (“to throw, shoot, pursue, rush”). Cognate with frr skut (“the fold of a garment, lap, coattail”), West Frisian skoat (“sheet; sail; lap”), Dutch schoot (“the fold of a garment, lap, sheet”), German Low German Schote (“a line from the foot of a sail”), German Schoß (“the fold of a garment, lap”), Danish skød (“lap, skirt”), Icelandic skaut (“the corner of a cloth, a line from the foot of a sail, the skirt or sleeve of a garment, a hood”), Norwegian skaut (“headdress”), Swedish sköt (“sheet”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA