Carpet/rug.The earliest English carpet was a tablecloth or bedspread. The word's use for a floor covering dates from around the 1400s. Carpet is from the Latin carpere (to pluck or pull to pieces)--early carpets, especially in poor households, would have been made from old clothes. Harvest (the plucking of crops) is from the same root, as is the German Herbst (autumn). Rug was first used in the modern sense of floor covering in the early 1800s. Earlier rugs were pieces of coarse woollen woollen fabrics such as tweeds, felts, flannels, blankets, knitwear made of wool with a shorter fiber length than that used for worsted. cloth and travel rugs were a necessity when travelling in winter in an unheated stagecoach. Rug is probably related to the Swedish rugg (ruffled ruf·fle 1 n. 1. A strip of frilled or closely pleated fabric used for trimming or decoration. 2. A ruff on a bird. 3. a. A ruckus or fray. b. Annoyance; vexation. 4. hair) and Old Norse rogg (tuft tuft (tuft) a small clump or cluster; a coil. tuft (toothbrush), n part of the toothbrush head, refers to the small, individual clusters of bristles that proceed from a single opening. ). Rugged (originally meaning hairy, shaggy or coarsely woven) is a related word. The pile of a carpet is from the Latin pilus pilus /pi·lus/ (pi´lus) pl. pi´li [L.] 1. a hair.pi´lial 2. one of the minute filamentous appendages of certain bacteria, associated with antigenic properties of the cell surface. (hair): the earliest floor coverings were probably animal skins. |
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