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Glite Dictionary
yard goods

yard goods

3.9
Cloth sold in lengths, usually measured in yards, for sewing and crafts
  • noun
  • US
translation icon : telas a granel
  • She chose vibrant yard goods to create a beautiful dress for the summer party.

Examples

  • Decorated with ribbons and scraps of yard goods, the result was said by all to be dazzling.

    Fiction book (1997)

  • In town, women pause in the heavy air of the millinery, linger over bolts of yard goods, barrels of clumped flour.

    Fiction book (2000)

  • At the fabric store, they sell various yard goods, ranging from cotton to silk.

  • He spent the afternoon browsing through colorful yard goods for his sewing project.

Synonyms

piece goods
vsyard goods
  • Specialized
1 6.7

Cloth sold in lengths by the yard or meter for sewing

is specific to fabrics measured with the imperial unit equal to three feet

Surface Forms

yard goods singular
yard goods plural

Morphology

yard + good

The meaning 'cloth sold by length measured in yards' is directly and compositionally derived from 'yard' (a unit of measurement) + 'goods' (products), so a learner who knows both constituents can infer the sense. Although 'yard' has other senses (e.g. garden), the commercial context (cloth, buying) makes the measure sense clear; the construction is cross‑linguistically common (e.g. 'tissus au mètre'), supporting transparency for B1 learners.

Etymology

Yard goods comes from fabric shops that measured cloth by the yard and sold those pieces as goods you could buy to sew. So it means 'cloth sold by length' today.