cloth

1. (countable, uncountable) A fabric, usually made of woven, knitted, or felted fibres or filaments, such as used in dressing, decorating, cleaning or other practical use.Examples: "In trumpets for assisting the hearing, all reverbation of the trumpet must be avoided. It must be made thick, of the least elastic materials, and covered with cloth externally."; "“It was last Saturday […] that two boys, playing in the little spinney just outside Wembley Park Station, came across three large parcels done up in American cloth.[…]”"; "There were other types of looms for producing various specialised types of cloth, for example fustians and velvets, but there is not space here to discuss these."Synonyms: material, stuffcountableuncountable

2. (countable) A piece of cloth used for a particular purpose.Examples: "The first room the people enter was formerly the Presence Chamber, which is hung completely with black, and at the r-end a cloth of estate, with a chair of estate standing upon the Haut-place under the state."; "The stole is a long scarf-like cloth that hangs around the neck, over the shoulders and down the front of bishops and priests [generally, two-four inches across]."; "Wipe the surface with a cloth dampened with mineral spirits in order to remove the sanding dust, then brush on a full coat of varnish."countable

3. (figurative) Substance or essence; the whole of something complex.Examples: ". If we look beyond the chaos of each moment, we cannot help seeing that we are but one glorious thread in the cloth of life."; "The disparate threads contained are, in the cloth of a religious society, ready to revolutionize the world and bring the Kingdom of Heaven into its full reality on earth."; ". The rhythm of life in rural Asia has followed an unchanging pattern from generation to generation and for the chronically poor it is soaked in the cloth of continued deprivation."countablefigurativelyuncountable

4. (figurative) Appearance; seeming.Examples: "Like all cultural realities, contemporary modernism is packed with its own myths, its own largely unrecognized metaphors, its own poetics literally perceived -- or should we say, "misperceived"? -- its own reifications and idiosyncratic distinctions. And it comes to us decorated in the cloth of emancipation, a new freedom that would seem to liberate us from those restraints and bonds that were the excretions of an older mindset, an alien political and social order, a rigid and stultifying hierarchy now perceived as riddled with superstition, arbitrary premise, and false conjunction — in contrast, of course, to the liberated mindset that bespeaks our own age!"; "Unbelievably, he smiled through his cracked and bleeding lips. A horrible nightmare cloaked in the cloth of good."; "Not until rehabilitation was wrapped in the cloth of wartime patriotism—a program billed as necessary for the welfare of disabled soldiers—did it receive overwhelming congressional support."countablefigurativelyuncountable

5. (idiomatic, with definite article) The priesthood.Examples: "He is a respected man of the cloth."; "As someone who finds clear shouts of lively encouragement easier to identify than the “still small voice of calm”, like the prairie rodent I scurried off to various members of the cloth to ask how they ascertained their calling."countableidiomaticuncountablewith-definite-article