woven

Pluralwovens

1. 1
   adjective

   Produced by weaving threads or strands together over and under one another.

   The museum displayed a woven tapestry from the fifteenth century.

   These artisans sell intricately woven blankets at the craft fair.

   Note

   The word reaches well beyond cloth to anything built by interlacing strands, including woven Kevlar tough enough to stop a bullet. It does not take more or most, because a thing either is woven or is not. Adverbs of manner sit comfortably in front of it, though: tightly woven, loosely woven, intricately woven.

2. 2
   verb

   Past participle of weave.

   The blanket had been woven by her grandmother.

   Several myths are woven into the play's dialogue.

   Note

   The participle works with have in perfect tenses (the spider had woven her web) and with be in the passive (it was woven by her grandmother). The simple past is wove. It carries the verb's figurative uses as readily as its literal ones: myths, themes and memories are woven into a work. That is the same picture of interlacing found in the "interlaced" adjective.

3. 3
   adjective

   Interlaced, with strands or parts passing over and under one another.

   The eagle built its nest from a densely woven mass of twigs.

   Their fingers stayed woven together as they walked.

   Similarinterlaced, intertwined, entwined, laced

   Note

   Here nothing need come off a loom. Twigs, fingers and lines of verse can all be woven when their parts pass in and out of one another, and the use is a natural one in praise of writing: the woven words of a sonnet. Where the literal fabric sense says how a thing was made, this one describes how its parts sit together.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A cloth formed by weaving, stretching only along the bias directions between the warp and weft unless the threads themselves are elastic.

   Designers prefer a tightly spun woven for structured garments.

   Unlike stretchy knits, wovens keep their shape under tension.

   Oppositeknit

   Note

   The adjective is put to work as a countable noun, with the ordinary plural: a woven, a rack of wovens. You can tell a woven by tugging it. Along the warp or the weft it barely gives, but on the bias, the diagonal between the two, it yields, unless elastic threads were woven into it.

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