swatch

American  

[swoch] / swɒtʃ /

noun

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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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

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

It does not take a genius to recognize, of course, that the new “why-how” test is in fact just … a means-ends test with a historical color swatch.

From Slate • Jul. 22, 2024

I watched a swatch of the sky turn red.

From "Kira-Kira" by Cynthia Kadohata