whole cloth

English

Pronunciation

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Noun

whole cloth (countable and uncountable, plural whole cloths)

1. (textiles) A newly made textile which has not yet been cut.

   Synonym: broadcloth

2. (figurative, 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.

   • 1917, Sydney Brooks, “What Great Britain is Doing”, in National Geographic:

     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.

3. (figurative, uncountable) Something made completely new, with no history, and not based on anything else.

   The plans for the widget were drawn from whole cloth.

   • 1883, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter 27, in Life on the Mississippi, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company, →OCLC:

     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.

   • 1852, Daniel De Leon, transl., chapter 1, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, translation of original by Karl Marx:

     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.

   • 1988, Supreme Court of Canada, R. v. Morgentaler:

     The decisions made by judges, however, and the interpretations that they advance or accept must be plausibly inferable from something in the Charter. It is not for the courts to manufacture a constitutional right out of whole cloth.

   • 2022, Mark Bergen, Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination‎^[1], Penguin, →ISBN:

     Susan Wojcicki became YouTube's leader during the obvious phase. She didn't need to invent YouTube's business plan from whole cloth.

Translations

newly made textile

complete fabrication

• Finnish: tuulesta temmattu (fi)
• German: frei erfunden
• Italian: di sana pianta
• Russian: ^{(please verify)} чисте́йшая вы́думка (čistéjšaja výdumka)

something not based on anything else

• Finnish: tyhjä (fi)
• Russian: ^{(please verify)} чи́стый ли́ст (čístyj líst)

Adverb

whole cloth (not comparable)

1. (idiomatic) in full extent, wholesale, entirely, without changes or additions
   • 2012 May 31, Tasha Robinson, “Film: Review: Snow White And The Huntsman”, in The A.V. Club‎^[2]:

     Some are strangely detailed, like the hugely antlered white deer-creature-cum-forest-god seemingly stolen whole cloth from Princess Mononoke.

Translations

entirely

• Russian: целико́м (ru) n (celikóm), подчисту́ю (ru) n (podčistúju)

Further reading

• “whole cloth”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.