rayon
Americannoun
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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:
Per Vogue, there’s Hubert de Givenchy’s 1953 “salt white” dress embroidered with sliced tomatoes, Cynthia Rowley’s 1993 tomato-printed rayon dress and Judith Leiber’s tomato rhinestone minaudière circa 1994.
From Salon ● Jun. 29, 2025
All contained cotton, in some cases mixed with other textiles such as spandex and rayon.
From Reuters ● Sep. 1, 2023
Columns by Times sportswriter Braven Dyer about better sports equipment and uniforms getting better results inspired the team manager to whip up a uniform of rayon shirts and pinstriped white flannel shorts.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 23, 2022
It’s also responsible for 15 percent of the world’s hops and about a tenth of global walnuts, peppers and rayon.
From New York Times ● Jun. 22, 2022
The young women, sitting in their own clusters on the lawn, wore short- heeled pumps and rayon hose, calf-length skirts, and loose-fitting blouses with ruffles and flounces on the sleeves and at the necklines.
From "The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics" by Daniel James Brown
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
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
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
For Rhodia fabrics, Leuenroth photographed Brazilian models wearing Rhodia clothes in Rome and Tokyo to convince women that Brazilian-made rayons and cottons are as smart as imports.
From Time Magazine Archive
Her eyes, so like the falling sterns, Seen on an August night, Had surely won from eastern sun Some rayons of his light.
From Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. by Leighton, Alexander
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.
