by Grammar Girl
It snowed in the Reno hills yesterday, which got me thinking about a woman who corrected me last year for writing something about a wool sweater. She insisted that I should have called it a “woolen sweater.”
“Wool sweater” has never been wrong, but a Google Ngram search shows that “wool sweater” has become the increasingly common choice since the 1970s:
You get a similar graph comparing “wool socks” to “woolen socks,” and “wool blazer” to “woolen blazer,” but interestingly, not when you compare “wool scarf” to “woolen scarf.” Writers seem to prefer their scarves woolen.
Nouns regularly serve as adjectives in English, and when they do, we call them attributive nouns. For example, California style includes many things: tree farms, cotton clothing, and avocado sandwiches. All the underlined words are attributive nouns.
Not all nouns have related adjectives. “Cotton” and “fleece,” for example, are your only choice for describing a cotton shirt or fleece jacket. Since “wool” and “silk” have the adjective forms “woolen” and “silken,” you get to choose between the attributive noun and adjective. You can wear a silken scarf with your woolen sweater, or you can wear a silk scarf with your wool sweater.
Mignon Fogarty is the author of Grammar Girl’s 101 Misused Words You’ll Never Confuse Again.
How about a silken scarf with a wool sweater or a silk scarf with a woolen sweater?
As an avid knitter (on my fifth pair of fingerless gloves this month) and a word nerd, I loved this post. Some of yarns are pure marino wool and make lovely, soft woolen gloves. I have one ball of yarn that is a silk and wool mixture I can’t wait to knit up… Ah the feel of silken-wool (or woolen-silk) gloves against my hands. Heavenly.
Interesting… although, as a Brit, I’d either say a woollie or a sweater, but if pushed I think it would be ‘woollen sweater’ rather than ‘wool sweater’ (double L in british english).
I think it’s a lot nicer to wear a silken sweater– very soft!
Thanks for your patience with those who seem to think it’s a good idea to correct THE Grammar Girl.
You are teh awesome!
But can you wear silken scarf with a wool sweater? Or would it be more correct to keep the forms together?
I tend to use silk, rather than silken in normal speech, but silken is the more logical choice if I’m writing fiction, or poetry.
Of course, if you are British, you might also refer to “cotton wool,” which I believe is what the Brits call the cotton balls or cotton batting.
It wouldn’t be technically wrong to mix adjectives and attributive nouns and write about a silken scarf with a wool sweater, for example, but stylistically, I think it usually sounds nicer to use one or the other in the same sentence.
Nice – also – FYI – heard you on I Should Be Writing the other day. Always interesting.
If I hear “silken”, I would almost think it’s something that is like silk, but not necessarily silk itself.
Perhaps “silken” and “woolen” lend themselves more toward describing the aesthetic feeling of the fabric, whereas “silk” and “wool” are more utilitarian descriptions of the fabric (what it’s made of, rather than the descriptive feeling you get when you touch them). Of course, that’s a subjective, picky stretch. Happy Thursday!
THose of us who craft with yarn, whether we are knitting or crocheting, often refer to our yarn, regardless of the fibre content as “wool,” even if it is something as non-natural as acrylic.
I tend to prefer the attributive noun. Mostly because I associate adjectives like “silken” with “silky” and the meaning starts to seem less clear. As always though, it all depends on context.
I’m not sure what rock I’ve been hiding under, but I didn’t know Google had this ngram search & graph feature. Word geek that I am – I’m very excited. Thank you for sharing this!
As a northern Brit, I go for ‘wooly jumper’.
Mignon, do people follow you around just hoping to catch a verbal faux pas? And are you ever tempted to give them a grammatically correct tongue lashing?
I agree with those who noted that an adjective like ‘silken’ is ambiguous compared to an attributive noun.
I might read ‘silken’ as ‘feels like silk’ as opposed to ‘made of silk’.
While I would probably assume ‘woolen’ refers to real ‘wool’, it’s still got a slight tinge of ambiguity and just sounds a bit stilted or literary to me. I can’t image using it in everyday speech. (Maybe I don’t see it as so ambiguous because, really, who would want to make something feel artificially like wool?)
Can’t beat the Scottish ‘woolly jumper’!
Originally the -en suffix meant “made of” and the -y suffix meant “like,” so we might talk about a woolen/woollen sweater, a silken scarf, an oaken table, a golden goblet, or a leathern belt – some of those being very archaic – to describe the actual object; and if one wanted to say someone had soft skin it would be “silky,” like silk, as opposed to “silken,” made of silk. But current usage doesn’t really make that distinction, so it’s more a matter of preference between wool, woolly, or woolen.
I’ve been crafting with yarn for 40 years, and never called it anything but “yarn.” My gran called it “wool.” Maybe it’s a regionalism.
I find it interesting that “[w]riters seem to prefer their scarves woolen” when in all other instances they tend to use just ‘wool’. Though, personally, I prefer my scarves anything but. Wool is too itchy on my neck.
As for silken, I don’t think I’ve heard that form applied to anything but tofu, skin, or vocal quality. I’ve almost never seen it used to describe the fabric itself.