[U]
1 a plant grown in warm countries for the soft white hairs around its seeds that are used to make fabric and thread:
cotton fields / plants * bales of cotton
2 the fabric made from the cotton plant:
The sheets are 100% pure cotton. * a cotton shirt / skirt * printed cotton fabric * the cotton industry * a cotton mill
3 (especially BrE) thread that is used for sewing:
sewing cotton * a cotton reel
4 (AmE) = COTTONWOOL:
Use a cotton ball to apply the lotion.
Part of speech: verb
PHRASALVERBS
cotton on (to sth) (informal) to begin to understand or realize sth without being told:
I suddenly cottoned on to what he was doing.
cotton (up) to sb/sth (AmE, informal) to make an attempt to be friendly to sb
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for cotton is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is cotton a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, cotton is tagged as noun.
Does cotton appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — cotton appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.