brocade

plural brocades

1. countableuncountableA thick heavy fabric into which raised patterns have been woven, originally in gold and silver; more recently any cloth incorporating raised, woven patterns.

   ‘Taffety brocade at ten shillings an ell at Simon Snippets, the woman’s tailor, now quite ruined. I shall go distracted.’

   1936, Norman Lindsay, The Flyaway Highway, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 56

   4 more examples

   Madame Legarde, the "glass of fashion and the nurse of form," (alias the most fashionable of milliners,) has comfortably assured me, "that my figure has great merit, and only requires cultivation:" this is to be done by tissues, brocades, and laces, which are now scattered round me in charming confusion.

   1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, pages 65–66

   … his desire to stand in brocade and sing Rhadames in Aida was like my eagerness to go far, far beyond fellow intellectuals of my generation who had lost the imaginative soul.

   1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 321

   I selected a pair of loose, dark trousers bound at the waist with a russet sash, a tunic with an open neck and large pockets, and a cloak of the true fuligin of that guild of which I am still officially a master, lined with particolored brocade.

   1987, Gene Wolfe, chapter XXV, in The Urth of the New Sun, 1st US edition, New York: Tor Books, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 149

   For all this, the worn collodion image gracing his memoirs shows a man of estimable appearance in a sober woolen suit and brocade waistcoat.

   2008, Harriet A. Washington, “Profitable Wonders”, in Medical Apartheid, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, page 52

2. countableuncountableAn item decorated with brocade.
3. countableuncountableAny of several species of noctuid moths such as some species in the genera Calophasia and Hadena

   Other species considered occasional migrants have become established in the UK in recent years, such as the ... sombre brocade, Blair's mocha, Flame brocade, and Clifden nonpareil.

   2016, P.P. Mary et al., edited by Akshay Kumar Chakravarthy et al., Arthropod Diversity and Conservation in the Tropics and Sub-tropics, Springer, →ISBN

4. countablefigurativelyuncountableA decorative pattern.

   Saying this, Rikyu stepped into the garden, shook a tree and scattered over the garden gold and crimson leaves, scraps of the brocade of autumn!

   2012, Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, →ISBN, page 36

   2 more examples

   The shrubbery around the cottages is a brocade of lawns and shrubs intermixed, in fancy patterns, with gravel walks, in various directions, which wind into the woods.

   1826, Thomas Dudley Fosbroke, A picturesque and topographical account of Cheltenham, and its Vicinity

   It is as though the poets and mystics were weaving a colorful brocade of words with the intention to please God and to show His greatness to the world.

   1976, Annemarie Schimmel, Pain and Grace: A Study of Two Mystical Writers of Eighteenth-Century Muslim India, page 126

present singular third person brocades · participle present brocading · participle past brocaded · past brocaded

1. To decorate fabric with raised woven patterns.