Sailcloth

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A strong and water-resistant fabric typically utilized for constructing sails on boats or ships
2. A heavy-duty textile designed to endure harsh marine conditions, especially for use in making sails
3. A durable and sturdy material crafted to form sails for boats and ships

Etymology: Sailcloth is about as transparent a compound as English offers: "sail" plus "cloth", with the two parts meaning exactly what they say. The more interesting thing is how old the pairing is. Its ancestor was already being used in Old English, and the name was built the same way in neighbouring languages, which suggests that the idea of a cloth woven specifically for sails goes back to a time when Germanic seafarers were sewing their own canvas. The word survives in Middle English as "seylecloth" and related spellings, and its form shifted over the centuries as the spelling of "sail" changed. Across the North Sea the same compound turns up in Dutch as "zeilkleed", in German as "Segelkleid", and in several other Low German and Frisian dialects, all built from the same two parts. The parallel shows that the name was not coined in English alone but was a shared Germanic way of naming a material that was essential to ships.

Synonyms: canvas, fabric