percale
- noun
- /pərˈkeɪl/
- She chose a white percale fabric to make her new bedspread.
- percale sheets
- cotton percale
Examples
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Disciplinary procedures were inscribed directly on Totonac bodies with legal requirements to wear "proper" western-style clothing: long pants for men and percale shifts for women.
Academic text (1996) -
The hotel provided luxurious cotton percale sheets that felt crisp and refreshing.
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Mother was lying up there on her percale sheets, bare as the day she was born.
Fiction book (1990) -
The other women wore percale and calico, with here and there a headrag among the older ones.
Fiction book (2002) -
A red felt tongue, smooth as the flowered percale sheets on my grandparents' bed, lolled at the top when the wheel was at rest.
Fiction book (1990) -
Fabric types included madras, cheviots, lawns, dimities, and percales, mostly in linen or cotton.
Academic text (2018) -
To feed, coax with homemade delicacies mouths too slack to chew; to wash them, to change their laundry, soft pastel percale, bright flowers.
Fiction book (1994) -
They were fashionably dressed, the men in dark cloth coats and the women in white cotton percale, with intricate lace frills at the neck and sleeves.
Fiction book (1996) -
The soft percale sheets kept me cool during the hot summer nights.
How Fine
Surface Forms
Etymology
Percale comes from the French word percale, and one idea traces it back to a Persian word meaning 'a piece of cloth'. So, think of percale as simply a kind of cloth — a fine, closely woven cotton used for sheets.