linsey-woolsey
Americannoun
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a coarse fabric woven from linen warp, or sometimes cotton, and coarse wool filling.
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a garment made from this.
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Archaic. any mixture that is incongruous or of poor quality; jumble.
That last speech was a linsey-woolsey of stale platitudes.
noun
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a thin rough fabric of linen warp and coarse wool or cotton filling
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a strange nonsensical mixture or confusion
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of linsey-woolsey
1425–75; late Middle English lynsy wolsye literally, linen cloth, wool cloth, equivalent to lyn ( Old English līn; see linen) + -sy, variant of say cloth (< Old French saie; akin to Medieval Latin sagia kind of weave, Latin sagum cloak) + wol wool + -sye, variant of say
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:
John Calhoun, born to the cotton rows and the linsey-woolsey of a South Carolina frontier farm, became the greatest spokesman the slave-owning aristocracy ever had.
From Time Magazine Archive
They talk of the wives of pioneers making linsey-woolsey dresses and men chopping down trees, but they omit things like the Monroe Doctrine.
From Time Magazine Archive
The linsey-woolsey costumes looked as if they had just come out of attic trunks.
From Time Magazine Archive
Those skimpy sleeves did not even cover her elbows, and the scratchy linsey-woolsey cloth kept her thin shoulders constantly twitching.
From "The Witch of Blackbird Pond" by Elizabeth George Speare
He sat on the ground, his feet bare, his linsey-woolsey blouse veined with dirt, his dark face caked with mud.
From "The Fighting Ground" by Avi
"Every farm house," says Coman, the economic historian, "was a workshop where the women spun and wove the serges, kerseys, and linsey-woolseys which served for the common wear."
From History of the United States by Beard, Charles A. (Charles Austin)
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.
