Thatch is a roof covering made of straw or reeds. A thatched cottage, re-thatch the roof, water reed thatch.
Done well it lasts fifty years or more and insulates better than tile, and it survives in Britain as a protected craft with a few hundred practitioners. Thatch also describes a thick head of hair. The word is a relative of deck, meaning a covering.
1nounthatchA roof covering made of straw or reeds.
“The old cottage had a roof of thick golden thatch where sparrows liked to nest.”
thatch is a roof covering.
Old English thaec meant a roof covering, from a Germanic root that also gave Dutch dak and German Dach, a roof.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)teg- — cover
Proto-Germanic
*þaką — covering
Proto-West Germanic
*þak
Old English
þæc — roof-covering
Middle English
thach
English, today
thatch
Variant of thack, from Middle English thach, from Old English þæc (“roof-covering”), from Proto-West Germanic þak, from Proto-Germanic þaką (“covering”), from (o-grade of) Proto-Indo-European (s)teg- (“cover”). Cognate with Icelandic þak, Dutch dak, German Dach, Norwegian tak, Swedish tak, Danish tag; and with Latin toga, Albanian thak (“awn, beard, pin, peg, tassel, fringe”), Lithuanian stogas (“roof”), Welsh to (“roof”). Related to Ancient Greek τέγος (“roof”) and στέγη (“roof”). See also English deech, deck.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA