26 July 2023
Besides its usual sense as a noun for the plant and the cloth made from it, cotton is also a verb meaning to get along with, to like. You see it in phrases like take a cotton to. How did the word for the plant acquire this verb sense?
First, the noun, which has a straightforward but atypical etymology. The English word comes from the Old French coton. But unlike most medieval borrowings from French, cotton does not originate in Latin. The French word comes from the Old Italian cotone. which comes from the Arabic قطن (quṭn or quṭun), an etymology that shows medieval Europe’s connections with the wider world.
As far as English usage goes, the noun cotton appears in a household inventory, written in Anglo-Latin, in the late thirteenth century and was probably in English-language use at that time, but it is not recorded in English-language writing until the early fourteenth century.
The verb to cotton appears in the late fifteenth century, still in the context of cloth and originally meaning to acquire a glossy surface, to take on a nap. We see it in a Scottish royal household account book from 1488:
Item, for v ½ elne blak clath to be viij pare of hos to thaim, price of the elne xv s.; summa iiij li. ij s. vj d.
Item, for xij elne of cotonyt quhit clath to lyne the saim hos, x s. viij d.
(Item, for 5 ½ ells of black cloth be 8 pairs of hose for them, price of an ell 15 shillings; total 4 pounds, 2 shillings, 6 pence.
Item, for 12 ells of cottoned white cloth to line the same hose, 10 shillings, 8 pence.)
By the mid sixteenth century, the verb had taken on a more figurative sense, meaning to be agreeable, prosper, succeed. In early use, it is often in the form this gear cottons as we see it in Thomas Preston’s c.1560 play Cambyses. In this scene, King Cambyses, upon hearing that his brother wished his death in order that he might succeed him, says:
KING
Were he father, as brother mine,
I swear that he shall die.
To palace mine I will therefore,
His death for to pursue. [Exit]AMBIDEXTER
Are ye gone? straightway I will follow you.
How like ye now, my masters? Doth not this gear cotton?
And we see it in the sense of to agree, to be agreeable, to work in harmony in Thomas Drant’s 1567 translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry):
So seyneth he, things true and false
to always mingleth he.
That first with midst, and midst with laste,
maye cotton, and agree.
Sources:
American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2022, s.v. cotton, n.
Dickson, Thomas, ed. Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland (Compota Thesaurariorum Regum Scotorum), vol. 1 of 13. Edinburgh: H.M. General Register, 1877, 164. fol. 70.a. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Drant, Thomas. Horace: His Arte of Poetrie, Pistles, and Satyrs Englished (1567). Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1972, sig. Av (reprint page 22). Archive.org.
Merriam-Webster, 23 June 2023, s.v. cotton.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. cotoun, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cotton, n.1, cotton, v.1.
Preston, Thomas. Cambyses (c. 1560). In Hazlitt, W. Carew, ed. A Select Collection of Old English Plays, fourth edition, vol 4. London: Reeves and Turner, 1874, 215. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Kimberly Vardeman, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.