Definitions

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

  • noun Plant stalks or foliage, such as reeds or palm fronds, used for roofing.
  • noun Something, such as a thick growth of hair on the head, that resembles thatch.
  • noun Dead turf, as on a lawn.
  • transitive verb To cover with or as if with thatch.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To cover with or as with thatch.
  • To thatch houses.
  • noun The covering of a roof or the like, made of straw or rushes, and in tropical countries of cocoanut-leaves and other long and thick-growing palmleaves.
  • noun One of the palms Calyptrogyne Swartzii and Copernicia tectorum, whose leaves are used in thatching. See also specific names below, and thatch-palm.

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

  • transitive verb To cover with, or with a roof of, straw, reeds, or some similar substance.
  • noun Straw, rushes, or the like, used for making or covering the roofs of buildings, or of stacks of hay or grain.
  • noun (Bot.) A name in the West Indies for several kinds of palm, the leaves of which are used for thatching.
  • noun [Prov. Eng.] the house sparrow.

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

  • verb To cover the roof with straw, reed, leaves, etc.
  • noun Straw, rushes, or the like, used for making or covering the roofs of buildings, or of stacks of hay or grain.
  • noun A name in the West Indies for several kinds of palm, the leaves of which are used for thatching.
  • noun A buildup of cut grass, stolons or other material on the soil in a lawn.

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

  • noun an English pirate who operated in the Caribbean and off the Atlantic coast of North America (died in 1718)
  • verb cover with thatch
  • noun plant stalks used as roofing material
  • noun a house roof made with a plant material (as straw)
  • noun hair resembling thatched roofing material

Etymologies

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

[Middle English thacche, alteration (influenced by thecchen, thacchen, to thatch, from Old English theccan, to cover) of thak, from Old English thæc; see (s)teg- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old English þeċċean, from Proto-Germanic *þakjanan. Cognate with West Frisian dekke, Dutch dekken, German decken, Danish tække, Swedish täcka.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Variant of thack, from Old English þæc ("roof-covering"), from Proto-Germanic *þakan (“covering”), from (o-grade of) Proto-Indo-European *teg- (“cover”). Cognate with Dutch dak, German Dach, Swedish tak, Danish tag; and with Latin toga, Albanian thak ("awn, beard, pin, peg, tassel, fringe"), Lithuanian stogas ("roof").

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