rayon
Americannoun
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rayons
plural
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a regenerated, semisynthetic textile filament made from cellulose, cotton linters, or wood chips by treating these with caustic soda and carbon disulfide and passing the resultant solution, viscose, through spinnerets.
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fabric made of this filament.
adjective
noun
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any of a number of textile fibres made from wood pulp or other forms of cellulose
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any fabric made from such a fibre
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(modifier) consisting of or involving rayon
a rayon shirt
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of rayon
First recorded in 1920–25; apparently based on ray 1
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Recycling textiles can be particularly tricky because a lot of clothing is made from a blend of materials from polyester—which is derived from oil—to cotton, rayon and nylon.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 3, 2026
Inside of her Hawaii room, where Barnett boasts having some of the first-ever rayon Hawaiian shirts, there’s even a closet stockpiled with tiki souvenirs, photos of Elvis Presley and decorative masks.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 9, 2025
It also had splashes of color: a gentle yellow, a rusty orange, a light brown and a mossy green, in the form of rayon fabrics made by Dupont covering the walls.
From New York Times ● Jan. 25, 2024
All contained cotton, in some cases mixed with other textiles such as spandex and rayon.
From Reuters ● Sep. 1, 2023
A blouse, by definition blousy, should have a looser fabric: silk, rayon, chiffon.
From "Not Nothing" by Gayle Forman
Even though I don’t have too many ’30s and ’40s, ’50s items, the items that I do have — I love the fabrics, the rayons.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 7, 2022
Three years ago he set his research chief, Everett Nutter, to developing a new cloth to meet the hot competition of rayons and tropical worsteds.
From Time Magazine Archive
Velvets, transparent and patterned; chiffons and rayons shot through with metal threads; woolens ingeniously woven through with small wisps of feathers.
From Time Magazine Archive
Brown Co. makes a Solka pulp used as raw material for rayons.
From Time Magazine Archive
Summer's Day," thus refers to them:— "The rayons of the sunne we see Diminish in their strength; The shade of everie tower and tree, Extended is in length.
From In the Border Country by W. S.
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
