Word.ws English Dictionary

whole cloth

whole cloth noun: a newly made textile which has not yet been cut.

Noun

whole cloth (countable and uncountable, plural whole cloths)

  1. A newly made textile which has not yet been cut.
    Synonyms:
    broadcloth
  2. (figuratively, uncountable, used attributively or preceded by various prepositions) The fictitious material from which complete fabrications, lies with no basis in truth, are made.
    • Mr. Doe's account of the accident was made from whole cloth.
    • All those tales that came clicking over the wireless of the capture of huge stores of grain and oil were fables out of whole cloth.1917, Sydney Brooks, “What Great Britain is Doing”, in National Geographic
  3. (figuratively, uncountable) Something made completely new, with no history, and not based on anything else.
    • The plans for the widget were drawn from whole cloth.
    • And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion.1883, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter 27, in Life on the Mississippi, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company, →OCLC

Adverb

whole cloth (not comparable)

  1. (idiomatic) In full extent, wholesale, entirely, without changes or additions.
    • Some are strangely detailed, like the hugely antlered white deer-creature-cum-forest-god seemingly stolen whole cloth from Princess Mononoke.2012 May 31, Tasha Robinson, “Film: Review: Snow White And The Huntsman”, in The A.V. Club

Examples of whole cloth in a sentence

  • Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.1852, Daniel De Leon, transl., chapter 1, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, translation of original by Karl Marx:
  • It is not for the courts to manufacture a constitutional right out of whole cloth.1988, Supreme Court of Canada, R. v. Morgentaler:
  • She didn't need to invent YouTube's business plan from whole cloth.2022, Mark Bergen, Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination, Penguin, →ISBN:

Synonyms of whole cloth

Forms of whole cloth

pluralwhole cloths

Questions about whole cloth

What does whole cloth mean?
Whole cloth means a newly made textile which has not yet been cut.
How do you use whole cloth in a sentence?
Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.
What part of speech is whole cloth?
Whole cloth can be a noun or an adverb.
What is the plural of whole cloth?
The plural of whole cloth is whole cloths.

Words near whole cloth in the dictionary

  1. whole boiling
  2. whole box of tricks
  3. whole chebang
  4. whole child
  5. whole children
  6. whole cloth
  7. whole cloths
  8. whole enchilada
  9. whole enchiladas
  10. whole food
  11. whole foods

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whole cloth (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-whole cloth.ogg.

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