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calico

/ˈkælɪkoʊ/

Coarse cotton cloth or mottled red-white coloring

From Malayalam kōḻi (palace) + Malayalam kōṭŭ (fortified palace).

noun
noun
adjective
kōḻi
Malayalam
കോഴി (kōḻi)
“Palace,” according to the supplied Malayalam analysis.
Malayalam place-name element
kōḻi
The first element of Kozhikode, the Indian port associated with calico cloth.
kōṭŭ
Malayalam
കോട് (kōṭŭ)
“Fortified palace,” according to the supplied Malayalam analysis.
Malayalam place-name element
kōṭŭ
The second element of Kozhikode, referring to a fortified place.
Combined
കോഴിക്കോട് (kōḻikkōṭŭ)
The Malayalam name of Kozhikode, historically known to Europeans as Calicut.
European usage
Calicut
The port on India’s Malabar Coast from which Europeans obtained the cloth.
English, 1530s
calico
A name for the cotton cloth exported from Calicut.
English, c. 1800–1807
calico
In American usage, a coarse printed cotton fabric; by 1807, also a term for variegated coloring.
Modern English
calico
“

Long before “calico” described a spotted cat, it was a traveler’s label for cloth bought at Calicut, the busy Malabar Coast port now called Kozhikode. The place-name is usually connected with Malayalam കോഴിക്കോട് (kōḻikkōṭŭ), analyzed as kōḻi, “palace,” plus kōṭŭ, “fortified palace”—though the older history is not perfectly settled, and etymologists also report a Tamil explanation involving a “fort of Kalliai.” Ptolemy was already mentioning a form resembling the place-name in antiquity, centuries before European merchants turned Calicut into a textile landmark. By about 1807, the cloth’s contrasting printed patches had jumped from fabric to color descriptions, and by 1882 “calico” was being applied especially to tortoiseshell-and-white cats. So a cat’s coat is, linguistically speaking, a little swatch of Indian export history walking around your kitchen.

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