swatch

American  

[swoch] / swɒtʃ /

noun

swatches plural

1. a sample of cloth or other material.

2. a sample, patch, or characteristic specimen of anything.

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swatch British  

/ swɒtʃ /

noun

1. a sample of cloth

2. a number of such samples, usually fastened together in book form

3. printing

   1. a small sample of colour supplied to the printer for matching during printing

   2. a sample of ink spread on paper by a printer to check the accuracy of a required colour

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• swatches
  plural

Etymology

Origin of swatch

First recorded in 1505–15; akin to switch

Explanation

A swatch is a small piece of fabric that's used as a sample. If you're considering buying a purple velvet couch, you can order a swatch to see if it's really going to match your living room rug. A swatch is useful because it gives you an idea of what something larger—like curtains, a dress, or an upholstered piece of furniture—will look like. Sometimes swatch is also used for samples of other things, like paint colors or makeup. Swatch comes from 16th-century Scots, in which it was used to mean "a tally fixed to a piece of cloth before dyeing."

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

swatch swatches

Grooms have shown Boston-based wedding planner Keri Ketterer Walter a specific tartan, a herringbone fabric swatch and “wallpaper that kind of looked like the scales of a trout” for decor inspiration, she said.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 19, 2026

Marshall recently screened a broad swatch of equities and found 25 stocks that have preannounced at least five times in January since 2011.

From Barron's ● Dec. 31, 2025

The prestige TV age is the product of creators willing to play with the rules of physics in unexpected ways, thanks to the man who made a broader swatch of the small screen seductively Lynchian.

From Salon ● Jan. 18, 2025

But that paradigm was upended Tuesday night, as a wide swatch of lower elevation Santa Monica was put under an evacuation warning.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 8, 2025

Then she held the same swatch against Penelope’s hair.

From "The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: Book I: The Mysterious Howling" by Maryrose Wood

There is only one highway into Enga Province and Care Australia said debris had fallen across large swatches of the road, limiting access to the rescue site.

From BBC ● May 26, 2024

On her worktable lay swatches of the silk and Lurex she would soon use to render her paintings and drawings into textiles.

From New York Times ● Apr. 27, 2024

Josh Bouganim, a software engineer, proposed examining both cards under 200x magnification to see if the threads in the swatches matched.

From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 14, 2024

Suppose two speakers of the same language are playing a guessing game where each has the same color swatches, and Player 1 tries to get Player 2 to guess a hue by naming the color.

From Science Daily ● Mar. 1, 2024

An involuntary shiver racked me, and I dropped the stack of swatches back in the box.

From "The City Beautiful" by Aden Polydoros