tapestry means A heavy woven cloth, often with decorative pictorial designs, normally hung on walls. It carries an Arena rating of 1888, earned across 33 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, tapestry ranks #64 of 17,135 for Most Malleable Words, #544 of 17,130 for Most Beautiful Words, #814 of 42,785 for Qualifying, #1,918 of 17,127 for Most Vivid Words.
tapestry is pronounced /ˈtæpəstɹi/.
Why “tapestry” is a great word
A heavy woven textile, often with decorative pictorial designs, used as a wall hanging or furnishing. From Middle English *tapestrie*, from Old French *tapisserie*, from Ancient Greek τάπης (*tápēs*, 'carpet, heavy fabric'), likely from an Iranian source. Unlike 'embroidery,' which overlays decoration onto an existing fabric, or 'mosaic,' which assembles an image from discrete fragments, tapestry is woven whole—its story and its substance born together, inseparable from the first warp to the final weft. It is the muffled acoustics of a castle hall lined with woven battles, the faintly dusty scent of an old chateau's wall hanging, the tactile warmth of a thousand colored strands forming a unicorn in a garden—the slow art of turning thread into memory, one knot at a time, where the most enduring pictures grow, irrevocably, from within.
Etymology
From Middle English tapestrie, from Old French tapisserie (“tapestry”), from Ancient Greek τάπης (tápēs), from an Iranian source.
noun
- A heavy woven cloth, often with decorative pictorial designs, normally hung on walls.
- Anything with variegated or complex details.e.g.“European adventurers found themselves within a watery world, a tapestry of streams, channels, wetlands, lakes and lush riparian meadows enriched by floodwaters from the Mississippi River.” — 2013 January-February, Nancy Langston, “The Fraught History of a Watery World”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 1, archived from the original on 22 Jan 2013, page 59:
verb
- To decorate with tapestry, or as if with a tapestry.e.g.“We had run above twenty miles when the sun set, carpeting the sea, and tapestrying the sky with a rare unison of delicate green and golden hues […]” — 1833, Adolphus Slade, Records of Travels in Turkey, Greece, &c., "Captain Pasha's Alarm", page 152:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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