clothnoun/klɒθ/

• 1

  A fabric, usually made of woven, knitted, or felted fibres or filaments, such as used in dressing, decorating, cleaning or other practical use. Sometimes, woven fabric specifically.

  • Near-synonyms: (not always differentiated) fabric, material (fabric sense), textile; see also Thesaurus:fabric
  • In trumpets for assisting the hearing, all reverbation of the trumpet must be avoided. It must be made thick, of the least elastic materials, and covered with cloth externally.
• 2

  Specifically, a tablecloth, especially as spread before a meal or removed afterwards.

  • One day he came, as I thought accidentally, to dinner. My huſband was very much engaged in buſineſs, and quitted the room ſoon after the cloth was removed.
• 3

  A piece of cloth used for a particular purpose.

  • The first room the people enter was formerly the Presence Chamber, which is hung completely with black, and at the r-end a cloth of estate, with a chair of estate standing upon the Haut-place under the state.
  • The stole is a long scarf-like cloth that hangs around the neck, over the shoulders and down the front of bishops and priests [generally, two-four inches across].
• 4

  Substance or essence; the whole of something complex.

  • . If we look beyond the chaos of each moment, we cannot help seeing that we are but one glorious thread in the cloth of life.
  • The disparate threads contained are, in the cloth of a religious society, ready to revolutionize the world and bring the Kingdom of Heaven into its full reality on earth.
• 5

  Appearance; seeming.

  • Like all cultural realities, contemporary modernism is packed with its own myths, its own largely unrecognized metaphors, its own poetics literally perceived -- or should we say, "misperceived"? -- its own reifications and idiosyncratic distinctions. And it comes to us decorated in the cloth of emancipation, a new freedom that would seem to liberate us from those restraints and bonds that were the excretions of an older mindset, an alien political and social order, a rigid and stultifying hierarchy now perceived as riddled with superstition, arbitrary premise, and false conjunction — in contrast, of course, to the liberated mindset that bespeaks our own age!
  • Unbelievably, he smiled through his cracked and bleeding lips. A horrible nightmare cloaked in the cloth of good.
• 6

  A form of attire that represents a particular profession or status.

  • But he could not come in the white cloth of celebration to a burial service, and he could hardly come in the cloth of mourning to celebrate his two decades on the stool.
  • Wearing the cloth of kings would seem to be an appropriate symbol.
• 7

  The priesthood.

  • He is a respected man of the cloth.
  • As someone who finds clear shouts of lively encouragement easier to identify than the “still small voice of calm”, like the prairie rodent I scurried off to various members of the cloth to ask how they ascertained their calling.