lint
Americannoun
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minute shreds or ravelings of yarn; bits of thread.
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staple cotton fiber used to make yarn.
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cotton waste produced by the ginning process.
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a soft material for dressing wounds, procured by scraping or otherwise treating linen cloth.
noun
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an absorbent cotton or linen fabric with the nap raised on one side, used to dress wounds, etc
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shreds of fibre, yarn, etc
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staple fibre for making cotton yarn
Other Word Forms
- delint verb (used with object)
- lintless adjective
- linty adjective
Etymology
Origin of lint
1325–75; Middle English, variant of linnet; compare Middle French linette linseed, Old English līnet- flax (or flax-field) in līnetwige lintwhite
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.
“I can’t tell you how many people think their phone is dead because there is pocket lint in the port,” says Wiens.
He has been but a speck of lint on the Lakers’ lapel, a bit of dust at the end of the Lakers’ bench, a small and irrelevant bystander in the Lakers’ long and arduous journey.
From Los Angeles Times
On the fifth floor, inspectors said, inmates were triple-bunked in a hot cell block where the air conditioners were filled with lint.
From Los Angeles Times
As he put it, “The speed of light is never going to go out of style. Gravity, lint, signs, time itself, is not going to go out of style.”
From Salon
To the untrained eye, it looks like a speck of black lint, not much larger than the tip of a pin.
From New York Times
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.
