Link Centre Dictionary

wool

UK/wʊl/ US/wʊl/ fairly common slang uk

noun

1.

a fabric made from the hair of sheep

Synonyms
2.

fiber sheared from animals (such as sheep) and twisted into yarn for weaving

3.

outer coat of especially sheep and yaks

Synonyms

Origin

From Middle English wolle, from Old English wull, from Proto-West Germanic *wullu, from Proto-Germanic *wullō, from Proto-Indo-European *h₂wĺ̥h₁neh₂. Cognates Cognate with Saterland Frisian Wulle, German Low German Wull, Dutch wol, German Wolle, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish ull, Danish uld; also Welsh gwlân, Latin lāna, Lithuanian vi̇̀lna, Russian во́лос (vólos), Slovak vlna, Bulgarian влас (vlas), Albanian lesh (“wool, hair, fleece”). Doublet of lana. The vowel development u → o → oo is purely graphical. Modern English generally avoids the string ⟨wu⟩ in favour of ⟨wo⟩, and the resulting woll was then altered to wool (as supposedly better representing the pronunciation).

Phrases

  • all cry and no wool
  • all wool and a yard wide
  • andalusian wool
  • angora wool
  • breech wool
  • burry wool
  • cony wool
  • cotton wool

Related words

Word family

Broader terms

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Parts

WordNet 2.1 (Princeton University). Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. WordNet 2.1 Copyright Princeton University. All rights reserved. Wiktionary content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence.