Word.ws English Dictionary

cloth-ears

cloth-ears noun: a person who cannot hear clearly or who fails to pay attention to what is said.

Noun

cloth-ears (plural cloth-ears)

  1. (UK, dated, derogatory, informal) A person who cannot hear clearly or who fails to pay attention to what is said.

Forms of cloth-ears

pluralcloth-ears

Origin of cloth-ears

The origin of the term is in the wool and cotton mills of Northern England where the noise of the machinery and build-up of cotton dust made it difficult to hear people speaking. The earliest example in print is "I wish you'd listen. Have you got cloth ears?" from Carnival, a novel by Compton Mackenzie (1912).

Questions about cloth-ears

What does cloth-ears mean?
Cloth-ears means a person who cannot hear clearly or who fails to pay attention to what is said.
What part of speech is cloth-ears?
Cloth-ears is a noun.
What is the plural of cloth-ears?
The plural of cloth-ears is cloth-ears.

Words near cloth-ears in the dictionary

  1. cloth of gold
  2. cloth of tissue
  3. cloth pad
  4. cloth pads
  5. cloth-eared
  6. cloth-ears
  7. clothback
  8. clothbacks
  9. clothbound
  10. clothe
  11. clothed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cloth-ears (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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