Other forms: silks
Silk is the fine smooth cloth made from the thread silkworms spin. A silk scarf, pure silk, smooth as silk.
It is uncountable for the material and the fibre. The word carries luxury with it, which is why silky and silken are used of anything smooth and expensive-feeling — a silky voice, silken hair. Note the Silk Road, the trade route by which silk reached Europe from China, which is one of the most used phrases in history writing. And in England a silk is a senior barrister, from the silk gown they wear: to take silk is to be appointed King's Counsel.
1nounsilkA fine smooth cloth made from the thread of silkworms.
“The lining is real silk and it shows.”
2nounitselfThe thread itself.
“The silk is unwound from the cocoon in one continuous thread.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
silk is a fabric.
Greek serikos meant of the Seres — the people the Greeks knew only as the suppliers of silk, somewhere far to the east. The English word carries the name of a nation nobody in Europe had met, preserved because of what they sold.
Ancient Greek
σηρικός
Latin
sēricus
Old English
sioloc
Middle English
silk
English, today
silk
Built from
From Middle English silk, sylk, selk, selc, from Old English sioloc, seoloc, seolc (“silk”). The immediate source is uncertain; it probably reached English via the Baltic trade routes (cognates in Old Norse silki (> Danish silke, Swedish silke (“silk”)), Russian шёлк, obsolete Lithuanian zilkaĩ), all ultimately from Latin sēricus, from Ancient Greek σηρικός, ultimately from an Oriental language (represented now by e.g. Chinese 絲 (“silk”)). Displaced Old English sīde (“silk”). Compare Seres. a doublet of seric and serge.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA