Chamlet

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A rare cloth historically woven from the hair of camels or goats, sometimes combined with silk or wool
2. An old textile fabric made from animal hair, often camel or goat, that was used for cloaks and garments
3. A woven material of coarse animal hair, traditionally from camels or goats, valued in earlier centuries for clothing

Etymology: Camlet, and its older spelling chamlet, is a fabric that has been through more transformations than most. The name travelled from Arabic "khamla", meaning velvet, into Old French as "chamelot", and then into Middle English. Yet the cloth it named was rarely velvet. Over the centuries, "camlet" came to describe a fabric made from goat's hair, silk, or wool, often woven to imitate a finer material, so the name outlasted the thing it first described. The shift from velvet to a coarser, cheaper textile is the striking part. A word borrowed to label a luxurious pile fabric ended up attached to humbler weaves, the sort of stuff a reader of an older text might associate with cloaks or linings rather than courtly display. The Arabic root survives only in the spelling's trail through French and English. The spelling "chamlet" is simply an older form of the same word, with the initial "ch" reflecting its French and Middle English route.

Synonyms: camlet