Word.ws English Dictionary

tow linen

tow linen noun: linen produced from tow (the shorter flax fibers produced by the retting process), spun on small table wheels, then plied and twisted a second time with additional strands.

Noun

tow linen

  1. Linen produced from tow (the shorter flax fibers produced by the retting process), spun on small table wheels, then plied and twisted a second time with additional strands.
    • The yearly allowance of clothing for the slaves on this plantation, consisted of two tow-linen shirts—such linen as the coarsest crash towels are made of1855, Frederick Douglass, chapter 3, in My Bondage and My Freedom. […], New York; Auburn, N.Y.: Miller, Orton & Mulligan […], →OCLC
    • The tow linen was the fiber of choice for making soft yarns for such end uses as undergarments, and for the making of thread.1995, Daryl M. Hafter, European Women and Preindustrial Craft, →ISBN, page 34

Questions about tow linen

What does tow linen mean?
Tow linen means linen produced from tow (the shorter flax fibers produced by the retting process), spun on small table wheels, then plied and twisted a second time with additional strands.
What part of speech is tow linen?
Tow linen is a noun.

Words near tow linen in the dictionary

  1. tow hitches
  2. tow iron
  3. tow irons
  4. Tow Law
  5. tow line
  6. tow linen
  7. tow lines
  8. TOW missile
  9. TOW missiles
  10. tow ring
  11. tow rings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tow linen (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.

Last updated:

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