wool

CEFRA2

/wʊl/

noun

Türkçe translations

Translating…

In plain English

  1. 01

    noun

    Soft, curly hair from sheep, used to make clothing and blankets.

  2. 02

    noun

    Extra detail

    A cloth or yarn made from such hair.

Examples

  • Sheep were kept for their wool and meat.

  • You cannot pull the wool over my eyes.

At a glance

Sits at A2 on the CEFR scale

Senses
5
Parts of speech
1
Citations
5
Synonyms
2

Also pronounced

  • [wul]
  • [wʊ̠ɫ]

Deep Dive

noun

Extra meanings

  1. Anything with a fibrous texture like that of sheep's wool.

  2. The hair of the sheep, llama and some other ruminants.

  3. A fine fiber obtained from the leaves of certain trees, such as firs and pines.

More examples

In context

  • Mr Brown is a wool merchant.

  • The sheep were caught and plucked, because shears had not yet been invented to cut the wool from the sheep's back.

  • Spielvogel said wet cleaning also has limitations; while it is fine for cottons and fabrics worn in warm climates, he said, it can damage heavy wools or structured clothes like suit jackets.

Synonyms

Quick test

Two questions on this entry. Nothing is scored.

Question 1 · Quick check

She knitted a warm sweater from the blank she had sheared from her own sheep.

Practise this properly in the app, where the word comes back before you forget it.

Nearby

Origin

noun

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 representin...