tapestry
Americannoun
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tapestries
plural
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a fabric consisting of a warp upon which colored threads are woven by hand to produce a design, often pictorial, used for wall hangings, furniture coverings, etc.
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a machine-woven reproduction of this.
verb (used with object)
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to furnish, cover, or adorn with tapestry.
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to represent or depict in a tapestry.
noun
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a heavy ornamental fabric, often in the form of a picture, used for wall hangings, furnishings, etc, and made by weaving coloured threads into a fixed warp
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another word for needlepoint
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a colourful and complicated situation
the rich tapestry of London life
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of tapestry
1400–50; late Middle English tapst ( e ) ry, tapistry < Middle French tapisserie carpeting. See tapis, -ery
Explanation
A tapestry is a picture woven into cloth. It's a decorative rug you hang on the wall, with detailed images or designs on it. Some tapestries, like the famous Unicorn Tapestries, tell stories with their pictures. Weaving an image into cloth is a brilliant idea — it makes art accessible and portable. And a tapestry offers something a painting can't: warmth. Think of those cold castle walls in medieval Europe, add a tapestry, and you're warmer already. You can use tapestry to describe anything that's multi-layered and complex, like the tapestry of life in a rural town, or the tapestry of your family history, or the tapestry of plot and character in your favorite novel.
Vocabulary lists containing tapestry
"The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell
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Other Words for Home
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Medieval Europe - Introductory
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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:
The exhibition opened on 10 September but has experienced a series of problems with queues and congestion, with some visitors spending longer than their allocated 40-minute slot viewing the tapestry.
From BBC ● Oct. 4, 2026
“We want the maximum number of kids to have access, to stand in front of that tapestry while it’s here in the U.K. It’s a major moment in our island’s history,” he told politicians.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 4, 2026
Probably designed and made soon after 1066 at Canterbury, it is not a true tapestry, but an embroidered narrative, and the oldest and most complete one we have.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 26, 2026
Hadyn Blakeston said he felt like he was on a "conveyor belt" while moving along the tapestry.
From BBC ● Sep. 10, 2026
Oblivious to all about him, even Matthias and the Abbot who had followed him out, Cluny stood staring at the tapestry.
From "Redwall" by Brian Jacques
The Battle of Pavia, a pivotal encounter during a series of wars fought for control of the Italian peninsula between 1494 and 1559, was vividly portrayed in seven huge tapestries presented to Charles in 1531.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 19, 2026
The facility will include state-of-the-art, climate-controlled storage for the museum’s more than 250,000-object collection of paintings, sculptures, photographs, tapestries and Cold War-era ephemera from the Soviet Union, East Bloc, China and other countries.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 10, 2026
“When you walk through, you won’t see boxes. You’ll see vases, tapestries, ceramics and more.”
From Los Angeles Times ● May 10, 2026
Highlights include the first painting he completed entirely on his own, as well as tapestries designed for the Sistine Chapel.
From Barron's ● Mar. 27, 2026
She’d bragged about her tapestries being better than Athena’s, which had led to Mount Olympus’s first reality TV punishment program: So You Think You Can Weave Better Than a Goddess?
From "The Mark of Athena" by Rick Riordan
The showiest destination of all is table 56, a dome-shaped tapestried booth.
From Washington Post ● Jan. 7, 2020
The film academy took the backdrop from the “Fit as a Fiddle” number in “Singin’ in the Rain,” the eerie landscape of “Forbidden Planet,” the tapestried walls of “Marie Antoinette,” the office from “Adam’s Rib.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 20, 2019
Their music echoes among the buttresses of the Hall’s ceiling, and dies in the tapestried dimness beyond our tables where the servants come and go.
From Salon ● Jun. 8, 2019
A wedding party of Africans and African-Americans tripped through, decked to the nines, some in gleaming white linen and tapestried skull caps.
From New York Times ● May 8, 2015
It was always cold in the tower, for all the carpets and the tapestried hangings and the rich furred clothing and the broad marble fireplaces they had.
From "A Wizard of Earthsea" by Ursula K. Le Guin
Trees vaulted the way tapestrying it with their leaves, between which one caught peeps at the sea, a shimmer of blue through a shimmer of green.
From Noto: an Unexplained Corner of Japan by Percival Lowell
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.
