camel's hair
1
7.1
- noun
- /ˈkeɪməlz hɛr/
:
pelo de camello
- Monty reaches into the pocket of his camel's hair coat and pulls out a handful of change.
- camel's hair coat
- camel's hair overcoat
Examples
-
He wore a stylish camel's hair coat to the winter gala.
-
Khari Greene, a pillar of a man wearing the exact same camel's hair coat as Monty, stands by the door, checking names off a clipboard.
Fiction book (2002) -
Washington wore a camel's hair coat over his suit.
Fiction book (1999) -
There was a young man in a beautiful camel's-hair overcoat standing behind us in the checkout aisle.
Fiction book (1995) -
Hausa merchants, women as well as men, walked about in heavy camel's-hair robes.
Academic text (2002) -
Monty walks down the snow-covered street, hands in the pockets of his camel's hair coat.
Fiction book (2002) -
And there was Dad, glimpsed unaware of the camera too, bareheaded, graying, in his camel's-hair coat, seen through a kitchen window as he was about to climb into the Mulvaneys' new gleaming-silver car.
Fiction book (1997) -
7 INT. ELEVATOR - MORNING Jack, wearing an elegant camel's hair overcoat and carrying a leather briefcase, a Master of the Universe smile on his face, now HUMMING the Bach piece from memory...
Fiction book (2000) -
November afternoon, pitch dark at five-thirty, and again Neil happens to see her by accident at the Texaco station, again in the camel's-hair coat, a sporty striped scarf wound around her throat.
Fiction book (1992) -
The fashion designer introduced a new line featuring camel's hair jackets.
Synonyms
A soft light brown cloth made from camel hair for coats and suits
How Soft
Surface Forms
Morphology
camel's + hair
This is a literal, compositional phrase: 'camel's' is the possessive of 'camel' and 'hair' denotes the animal fibre, so the meaning 'hair of a camel' (used as a fabric) follows directly from its parts. The material sense (a fabric made from camel hair, often tan) is predictable from the constituents and is cross-linguistically common, so a B1 learner who knows the words can understand it.
Etymology
Camel's hair comes from the soft hair of the camel, which people turned into a warm, light tan cloth. So the phrase means 'a soft, tan fabric made from camel hair'.