Word.ws English Dictionary

mat

UK/mæt//mæt/

mat noun: a flat piece of coarse material used for wiping one’s feet, or as a decorative or protective floor covering. Also the clipping of material.

mat: a flat piece of coarse material used for wiping one’s feet, or as a decorative or protective floor...
Image: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun (1)

mat (plural mats)

  1. A flat piece of coarse material used for wiping one’s feet, or as a decorative or protective floor covering.
    • Wipe your feet on the mat before coming in.
  2. A small flat piece of material used to protect a surface from anything hot or rough; a coaster.
    • They put mats on the table during mealtimes.
  3. A floor pad to protect athletes.
    • The high jumper cleared the bar and landed safely on the mat.
  4. A thickly tangled mess.
    • a mat of weeds
    • But to return to where we left her, I see her still, propped up in a kind of stupor against one of the walls in which this wretched edifice abounds, her long grey greasy hair framing in its cowl of scrofulous mats a face where pallor, languor, hunger, acne, recent dirt, immemorial chagrin and...1953, Samuel Beckett, Watt, [Paris]: Olympia Press, →OCLC
  5. A thin layer of woven, non-woven, or knitted fiber that serves as reinforcement to a material.
  6. A thin surface layer; superficial cover.
    • Iceland moss growing in a mat
    • The fad for blaming all mass extinctions (such as happened at the end of the Cretaceous when the dinosaurs vanished) on impacts of objects from space was extended to the Pleistocene in 2007. That year a group of scientists proposed that the North American extinctions were due to a comet or...2016 November 15, Donald R. Prothero, The Princeton Field Guide to Prehistoric Mammals, page 222

Verb

mat (third-person singular simple present mats, present participle matting, simple past and past participle matted)

  1. (transitive) To cover, protect or decorate with mats.
    • Be careful now to keep the Doors and Windows of your Conservatories well matted1664, J[ohn] E[velyn], “Kalendarium Hortense: Or, The Gard’ners Almanac; […] ”, in Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesties Dominions. […], London: […]...
  2. (intransitive) To form a thick, tangled mess; to interweave into, or like, a mat; to entangle.
    • And o'er his eyebrows hung his matted hair.1700, [John] Dryden, “Palamon and Arcite: Or, The Knight’s Tale. In Three Books.”, in Fables Ancient and Modern; […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC

Noun (2)

mat (plural mats)

  1. An alloy of copper, tin, iron, etc.; white metal.

Noun (3)

mat (uncountable)

  1. Vulgar, obscene, or profane language in Russian and some other Slavic language communities.
    • Most teenagers go through times when they use mat "rather heavily" among themselves. I guess they associate it with being adults. In most cases though this goes away pretty fast, usually when they start dating girls. Using mat rather heavily after graduating from university is a differnet^([sic])...1991 September 16, Michael Rabinovich, “Profanity in the USSR”, in soc.culture.soviet (Usenet), archived from the original on 15 Aug 2025
    • Don't you people have anything better to do than collecting mat. I still can't undestand why people in (and from) the ex-USSR like to swear so much.1993 March 31, Elena Tsifrina, “let's collect MAT”, in soc.culture.soviet (Usenet), archived from the original on 15 Aug 2025

Noun (4) capitalized: MAT

MAT (plural MATs)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of medication-assisted treatment.
  2. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of Master of Arts in Teaching.

Proper noun capitalized: Mat

Mat (plural Mats)

  1. A diminutive of the male given name Matthew.
  2. (Singapore, ethnic, slur) a Malay man

Also used as

mat is also the clipping of material.

mat is also the alternative form of matte.

mat is also the abbreviation of matinee.

mat is also the alternative spelling of matte.

mat is also the clipping of matrix.

mat meaning in Hindi, Marathi, Urdu and Bengali

mat in Hindi

foot wiping device or floor covering
पायदान pāydān

mat in Marathi

चटई

mat in Urdu

چٹائی

mat in Bengali

মাদুর
More languagesFewer languages
mat in Malayalam
പായ pāya, തടുക്ക് taṭukkŭ
mat in Kannada
ಚಾಪೆ
mat in Gujarati
સાદડી
mat in Arabic
حَصِيرَة ḥaṣīra
mat in Malay
tikar
mat in Indonesian
tikar
mat in Persian
زیلو zilu
mat in Thai
เสื่อ sʉ̀ʉa, พรม prom, พรมเช็ดเท้า

Examples of mat in a sentence

  • and now only a sord of Mallards drifted through the dense mats of New Zealand pigmyweed that coated the surface of the water.2018, Steve Burrows, A Tiding of Magpies: A Birder Murder Mystery, Oneworld Publications:
  • Most teenagers go through times when they use mat "rather heavily" among themselves.1991 September 16, Michael Rabinovich, “Profanity in the USSR”, in soc.culture.soviet (Usenet), archived from the original on 15 Aug 2025:
  • As the Russian mentality (hopefully) will be less medieval, mat will lose its social role.1993 June 22, Boris A. Veytsman, “Russian "mat" and Russian mentality”, in talk.politics.soviet (Usenet), archived from the original on 15...

All 40 example sentences with mat

Forms of mat

Noun
pluralmats
alternative formmatt
pluralMATs
Verb
third-person singular presentmats
present participlematting
past participlematted
pastmatted
Proper noun
pluralMats

Past tense of mat: matted

Plural of mat: mats

Origin of mat

Inherited from Middle English matte (“mat”), from Old English meatte (“mat”), from Late Latin matta (“mat made of rushes”), from Punic or Phoenician (compare Hebrew מיטה \ מִטָּה (mitá, “bed, couch”)). Cognate with German Matte (“mat”), Danish måtte (“mat”), Faroese and Icelandic motta (“rug, mat”), Norwegian matte (“mat, rug”), Swedish matta (“carpet, rug, mat”).

Compare matte.

A clipped form of matinee.

Words formed from mat

Phrases with mat

6 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with mat

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about mat

What does mat mean?
Mat means a flat piece of coarse material used for wiping one’s feet, or as a decorative or protective floor covering.
What is mat in Hindi?
Mat in Hindi is पायदान (pāydān). See Mat meaning in Hindi.
How do you use mat in a sentence?
and now only a sord of Mallards drifted through the dense mats of New Zealand pigmyweed that coated the surface of the water.
What part of speech is mat?
Mat can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce mat?
Mat is pronounced /mæt/ (UK).
What is the plural of mat?
The plural of mat is mats.

Words near mat in the dictionary

  1. masurium
  2. masutomilite
  3. masuyite
  4. Masvingo
  5. masyu
  6. mat
  7. mat amaranth
  8. mat amaranths
  9. mat bean
  10. mat beans
  11. mat daisy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mat (page history and authors); MAT (page history and authors); Mat (page history and authors); mat (Marathi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); mat (Urdu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); mat (Bengali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); mat (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); mat (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-mat.ogg.

Cite this entry: “mat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.