Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A heavy cloth woven with rich, often varicolored designs or scenes, usually hung on walls for decoration and sometimes used to cover furniture.
  • noun A cloth embroidered with designs or scenes, especially one made in the Middle Ages.
  • noun Something felt to resemble a richly and complexly designed cloth.
  • transitive verb To hang or decorate with tapestry.
  • transitive verb To make, weave, or depict in a tapestry.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A fabric resembling textile fabrics in that it consists of a warp upon which colored threads of wool, silk, gold, or silver are fixed to produce a pattern, but differing from it in the fact that these threads are not thrown with the shuttle, but are put in one by one with a needle.
  • noun Tapestry now made in the city of Aubusson for wall-hangings and curtains. The greater part of the modern tapestry offered for sale in Paris is attributed to this make. Some of it is of great beauty; but in general old designs are copied, or modified to suit the size of rooms for which the hangings are ordered.
  • noun By abuse of the name, a printed worsted cloth for covering chairs, sofas, etc., in imitation of tapestry. See gobelin.
  • To adorn with tapestry.
  • To adorn with hangings or with any pendent covering.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A fabric, usually of worsted, worked upon a warp of linen or other thread by hand, the designs being usually more or less pictorial and the stuff employed for wall hangings and the like. The term is also applied to different kinds of embroidery.
  • noun a kind of carpet, somewhat resembling Brussels, in which the warp is printed before weaving, so as to produce the figure in the cloth.
  • noun (Zoöl.) Same as Carpet moth, under Carpet.
  • transitive verb To adorn with tapestry, or as with tapestry.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A heavy woven cloth, often with decorative pictorial designs, normally hung on walls.
  • noun by extension Anything with variegated or complex details.
  • verb To decorate with tapestry, or as if with a tapestry.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a heavy textile with a woven design; used for curtains and upholstery
  • noun a wall hanging of heavy handwoven fabric with pictorial designs
  • noun something that resembles a tapestry in its complex pictorial designs

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English tapiceri, tapstri, from Old French tapisserie, from tapisser, to cover with carpet, from tapis, carpet, from Greek tapētion, diminutive of tapēs, perhaps of Iranian origin.]

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