Textile glossary.
Detailed definitions of fiber structure, fabric construction, measurements, processing and sourcing claims. Start with a short answer, then explore how the term is used and what it does not tell you.
102 entries · Technical references reviewed 2026-09-22 · Original explanations by Chaos.
Search and filter in the interactive glossary ↗- Fiber structure
Bast fiber
Fiber obtained from the stem tissues of plants such as flax, hemp and ramie.
- Fiber structure
Bicomponent fiber
A manufactured fiber extruded from two polymers, or two grades of one polymer, through the same spinneret so that both run continuously along the fiber in a defined cross-sectional arrangement.
- Claims & sourcing
Biodegradable
Able to be broken down by microorganisms into carbon dioxide, water, methane and biomass; as a marketing claim, it needs evidence tied to realistic disposal conditions.
- Processing
Carbonizing
A wool-cleaning process that uses sulfuric acid and heat to make cellulose-based vegetable matter brittle so it can be crushed and removed from the fiber.
- Processing
Carding
Opening and separating fibers into a web or strand before spinning.
- Fiber structure
Cellulose
A linear polysaccharide of glucose units joined by beta-1,4-glycosidic bonds that forms the load-bearing framework of plant cell walls and the main substance of cotton, flax and regenerated fibers.
- Claims & sourcing
Chain of custody
A documented system for tracking a claimed material through successive organizations.
- Fabric performance
Colorfastness
Colorfastness is a textile's resistance to change in its own color, and to transferring color onto other materials, under a defined exposure such as washing, light, rubbing or perspiration.
- Processing
Combing
Removing shorter fibers and aligning longer fibers before some spinning processes.
- Processing
Cottonization
Processing a bast fiber into shorter, finer elements suited to cotton-type equipment.
- Fiber structure
Crimp
The natural or induced waviness along a fiber's length, expressed as crimp frequency or curvature, which affects bulk, elasticity, fiber cohesion during processing, and hand.
- Fiber structure
Crystallinity
The fraction of a fiber's polymer that is packed into ordered crystalline regions rather than disordered amorphous ones, which strongly shapes strength, stiffness, dye uptake and moisture absorption.
- Fiber structure
Cuticle scales
The overlapping, flattened cells that form the outer layer of wool and hair fibers, with their free edges pointing toward the fiber tip.
- Processing
Decortication
Decortication mechanically strips fiber from the surrounding plant tissue: the woody core of bast stems such as hemp and kenaf, or the fleshy pulp of leaves such as sisal.
- Processing
Degumming
Degumming removes gummy non-fiber material from a fiber: most often the sericin coating of silk, and also the pectins and hemicelluloses that bind ramie and other bast fibers.
- Processing
Dehairing
Separating fine undercoat from coarser guard hair.
- Measurements
Denier
A linear density unit: grams per 9,000 meters of yarn or fiber.
- Color & finishing
Disperse dye
A disperse dye is a small, nonionic, sparingly water-soluble colorant applied as a fine aqueous dispersion that dissolves into hydrophobic fibers, chiefly polyester.
- Yarn formation
Drafting
Drafting attenuates a fiber strand by making fibers slide past one another, usually between pairs of rollers running at increasing surface speeds, so the strand becomes longer and finer.
- Fabric performance
Drape
How a fabric falls and folds under its own weight.
- Color & finishing
Dyeing
Applying color to fiber, yarn, fabric or a finished garment.
- Fiber structure
Elastane
A highly extensible synthetic fiber also known as spandex.
- Labeling & law
EU Textile Fibre Names Regulation
Regulation (EU) No 1007/2011, the EU law that fixes permitted textile fiber names and requires fiber-composition labeling or marking of textile products placed on the EU market.
- Measurements
Fabric weight (GSM)
Fabric weight is mass per unit area, usually stated in grams per square meter (GSM, g/m2) or ounces per square yard, and sometimes misleadingly as ounces per linear yard.
- Fabric construction
Felting
Felting is the irreversible matting of wool and other animal fibers into a dense, entangled mass under moisture, warmth and agitation, used to make felt directly from loose fiber.
- Fabric performance
Fiber fragment release
The shedding of short fiber pieces from textiles during manufacture, wear, washing and drying, measured as the mass, count or length of fragments released.
- Fiber structure
Fibroin
The structural core protein of silk; in Bombyx mori it is a complex of heavy and light chains whose glycine- and alanine-rich repeats crystallize into antiparallel beta sheets.
- Fiber structure
Filament
A fiber of continuous or very long length, unlike a staple fiber.
- Measurements
Fill power
A measure of down's loft: the volume a conditioned sample of down occupies per unit mass under a light standard load, quoted in cubic inches per ounce in US practice.
- Color & finishing
Finishing
Treatments after or around fabric formation that change appearance, feel or performance.
- Fabric construction
Fresco
Fresco is a high-twist, relatively open suiting cloth, usually worsted wool, made for warm-weather wear with a dry, porous hand.
- Color & finishing
Fulling
Fulling, also called milling, finishes woven or knitted wool cloth with moisture, warmth, soap or alkali and mechanical action so it shrinks, thickens and partly felts into a denser fabric.
- Fabric construction
Gabardine
Gabardine is a firm, warp-faced steep twill cloth, long used for suits, trousers, uniforms and rainwear, and made in wool, cotton or blends.
- Labeling & law
Generic fiber name
The official name of a fiber class, such as polyester, nylon or elastane, that fiber-content labels in regulated markets must use in place of, or alongside, any trademark.
- Processing
Ginning
Separating cotton lint from seeds and other material.
- Fiber structure
Glass transition temperature
The temperature range over which the disordered (amorphous) regions of a polymer change from a rigid, glassy state to a softer, rubbery state in which chain segments can move.
- Processing
Greasy wool
Raw fleece before washing removes much of its grease and dirt.
- Labeling & law
Green Guides
Federal Trade Commission guidance at 16 CFR Part 260 explaining how the Commission applies its deception standard to environmental marketing claims such as recycled, biodegradable and general eco-friendly claims.
- Fiber structure
Guard hair
Coarser outer hair in an animal coat, distinct from a fine undercoat.
- Processing
Hackling
Hackling, or heckling, combs scutched flax or hemp through progressively finer beds of steel pins, splitting and straightening the fiber bundles and separating long line fiber from short tow.
- Fabric performance
Hand
The tactile feel of a textile, including softness, stiffness and surface character.
- Color & finishing
Heat setting
Heat setting stabilizes thermoplastic fibers, yarns or fabrics by heating them above their glass transition temperature in a chosen shape and then cooling, so shape and dimensions persist in later use.
- Yarn formation
High-twist
High-twist describes yarns spun or thrown with more turns than a comparable soft-spun yarn, producing a springy, often drier hand used in crepes, voiles and tropical suitings such as fresco.
- Fabric construction
Jersey
Jersey, or single jersey, is the basic weft-knitted fabric made on one set of needles, with V-shaped loop legs on the technical face and loop heads on the technical back.
- Fiber structure
Keratin
A family of sulfur-rich structural proteins that make up wool, hair and horn; in textile fibers it forms alpha-helical filaments embedded in a protein matrix cross-linked by cystine disulfide bonds.
- Fabric construction
Knitting
Making fabric by interlooping yarn.
- Claims & sourcing
Life cycle assessment
A standardized method for quantifying the environmental impacts of a product across its life stages, from raw material extraction through production, use and disposal.
- Fiber structure
Lignin
A cross-linked aromatic polymer in plant cell walls that stiffens and waterproofs tissue; in bast fibers it helps bind cells together and affects stiffness, color and processing.
- Fiber structure
Lumen
The central cavity inside a plant fiber cell, left as the cell wall thickens; its size and collapse shape cotton's twisted form and relate directly to fiber maturity.
- Fabric performance
Luster
The sheen of a fiber, yarn or fabric, produced when smooth surfaces reflect light in a concentrated, mirror-like direction instead of scattering it diffusely, which would give a matte look.
- Claims & sourcing
Mass balance
A chain-of-custody accounting model in which certified and uncertified inputs may be physically mixed, while certified claims on outputs are capped by the verified quantity of certified input.
- Fiber structure
Medulla
The central core of some animal fibers, made of loosely packed cells and air spaces, found in coarse wool, many hair fibers and kemp but usually absent from fine wool.
- Processing
Melt spinning
Melt spinning makes synthetic filaments by melting a thermoplastic polymer, extruding it through a spinneret, cooling the jets into solid filaments and drawing them to align the molecules.
- Color & finishing
Mercerization
Mercerization treats cotton or other cellulose with concentrated sodium hydroxide, usually under tension, swelling the fibers so they become rounder, more lustrous, stronger and more receptive to dye.
- Measurements
Microfiber
A manufactured fiber or filament finer than a conventional threshold, often set at 1 decitex (0.1 tex) per filament, used for soft, dense fabrics and cleaning cloths.
- Measurements
Micron
One micrometer. Often used to describe fiber diameter, but not a complete quality score.
- Measurements
Moisture regain
The mass of water a fiber holds, expressed as a percentage of its oven-dry mass, once it has come to equilibrium with a stated atmosphere of temperature and relative humidity.
- Measurements
Momme
Momme is a traditional Japanese-derived unit used to express silk fabric weight; one momme corresponds to about 4.34 grams per square meter.
- Color & finishing
Mordant
A mordant is a substance, usually a metal salt or a tannin, that links a dye to a fiber by forming a complex, improving uptake and fastness and often shifting the shade.
- Claims & sourcing
Mulesing
A surgical procedure performed mainly on Australian Merino lambs that removes wrinkled, wool-bearing skin from the breech to reduce the risk of breech flystrike.
- Fabric construction
Nonwoven
A nonwoven is a sheet or web of fibers or filaments bonded by mechanical, thermal or chemical means rather than by weaving, knitting or interlacing yarns, used in hygiene, filtration, geotextile and apparel products.
- Claims & sourcing
Organic content claim
A statement that a product contains a stated share of organically grown fiber, usually supported by a chain-of-custody standard such as Textile Exchange's Organic Content Standard.
- Fabric performance
Pilling
The formation of small fiber balls on a fabric surface through wear and friction.
- Fabric construction
Plain weave
Plain weave is the simplest interlacing, in which each weft passes alternately over one warp end and under the next, reversing on every pick.
- Claims & sourcing
Post-consumer
Material recovered after a product has been used by its end user.
- Claims & sourcing
Pre-consumer
Material diverted from a manufacturing waste stream, subject to the applicable definition.
- Color & finishing
Reactive dye
A reactive dye is a colorant carrying a chemical group that forms a covalent bond with the fiber, most importantly with hydroxyl groups of cellulose in cotton and viscose.
- Yarn formation
Reeling
Reeling unwinds the continuous filaments of several softened silk cocoons at once and combines them into a single raw silk thread of controlled size, wound onto a reel.
- Fiber structure
Regenerated cellulose
Cellulose dissolved and formed again as a manufactured textile fiber.
- Claims & sourcing
Regenerative agriculture
A family of farming and grazing approaches aimed at rebuilding soil health, biodiversity and ecosystem processes, which still lacks a consensus definition or a single standardized certification.
- Processing
Retting
Breaking down the tissues that bind bast fibers to the stem, using an appropriate biological or processing route.
- Yarn formation
Roving
Roving is an intermediate fiber strand, finer than sliver and held together by a small protective twist or by rubbing, that feeds the ring spinning frame.
- Color & finishing
Sanforizing
A mechanical compressive-shrinkage finish, associated with the Sanforized trademark, that preshrinks woven cotton fabric lengthwise so the finished cloth shrinks little in later washing.
- Fabric construction
Satin
Satin is a weave with long floats and widely separated, non-adjacent interlacings, giving a smooth, lustrous face dominated by either warp (satin) or weft (sateen).
- Processing
Scouring
Cleaning raw fiber or textiles to remove unwanted grease, dirt or processing residues.
- Processing
Scutching
Mechanically separating retted flax fiber from woody stem fragments.
- Fiber structure
Sericin
The water-soluble, serine-rich glycoprotein gum that coats and binds the two fibroin strands of a raw silk filament and is largely removed during degumming.
- Processing
Sericulture
Sericulture is the rearing of silkworms, chiefly the domesticated moth Bombyx mori fed on mulberry leaves, to produce cocoons for silk, from egg production through larval feeding to cocoon harvest.
- Processing
Sliver
An untwisted strand of fibers prepared for further processing.
- Color & finishing
Solution dyeing
Solution dyeing colors a manufactured fiber by adding pigment or dye to the polymer melt or spinning solution (the dope) before extrusion, so color is distributed through the fiber.
- Processing
Solution spinning
Solution spinning makes fibers from polymers that cannot be melted without degrading, by dissolving them into a viscous dope, extruding it and removing the solvent by evaporation or coagulation.
- Yarn formation
Spinning
Spinning turns fibers into continuous yarn by drafting them to the required fineness and binding them with twist, wrapping or entanglement; the same word also names extruding polymers into filaments.
- Fiber structure
Staple
A fiber of finite length, which can be natural or manufactured.
- Measurements
Super S numbers
Super S numbers, such as Super 120s, are designations on worsted wool fabrics that signal the fineness of the wool fibers used, with higher numbers indicating finer fiber.
- Color & finishing
Superwash
A shrink-resist treatment that degrades or coats the cuticle scales of wool so that the fiber can be machine washed with little felting shrinkage.
- Measurements
Tenacity
The breaking force of a fiber or yarn divided by its linear density, a mass-normalized strength usually expressed in centinewtons per tex or grams-force per denier.
- Measurements
Tex
Tex is the direct, metric unit of linear density for fibers and yarns: the mass in grams of 1,000 meters of material, with decitex (dtex) giving grams per 10,000 meters.
- Labeling & law
Textile Fiber Products Identification Act
A 1958 US federal statute, 15 U.S.C. 70 et seq., requiring fiber content, country of origin and responsible-company disclosures for most textile fiber products sold in the United States.
- Yarn formation
Texturing
Texturing treats smooth continuous-filament yarn to give it crimp, loops or bulk, making it softer, fuller, more opaque or stretchier than flat filament yarn.
- Measurements
Thread count
Thread count is the number of warp ends plus weft picks in one square inch of woven fabric, most often quoted for bed sheets.
- Processing
Top
A prepared strand of combed fibers used in worsted-type processing.
- Claims & sourcing
Traceability
The ability to follow material history through specified records and stages.
- Claims & sourcing
Transaction certificate
A document issued by a certification body confirming that a specific shipment of goods, sold by a certified supplier, contains material certified to a named standard.
- Fabric construction
Twill
Twill is a weave in which interlacings step over by one yarn on each successive pick, producing diagonal lines called wales across the fabric.
- Yarn formation
Twist
Twist is the helical rotation of fibers or filaments around a yarn's axis, stated as turns per unit length plus a direction (S or Z), that holds staple fibers together.
- Color & finishing
Vat dye
A vat dye is an insoluble colorant that is chemically reduced to a soluble leuco form for application, then reoxidized inside the fiber to its insoluble colored form.
- Fabric construction
Warp & weft
The lengthwise and crosswise yarn systems in a woven fabric.
- Fabric construction
Weaving
Interlacing yarn systems to create fabric.
- Fabric performance
Wicking
Wicking is the spontaneous transport of liquid through or along a textile by capillary action in the spaces between fibers and yarns.
- Labeling & law
Wool Products Labeling Act
A 1939 US federal statute, 15 U.S.C. 68 et seq., requiring wool products to disclose wool, recycled wool and other fiber content by percentage of weight.
- Processing
Worsted
A yarn-processing route using prepared, aligned and typically combed fibers.
- Measurements
Yarn count
Yarn count is a number expressing a yarn's fineness as length per unit mass (indirect systems such as Ne and Nm) or mass per unit length (direct systems such as tex and denier).