خملة

Arabic khamlat (خملة) meant a plush or napped fabric, from the root kh-m-l meaning 'to be velvety.' The cloth was woven in Anatolia and the Levant, often from a blend of camel hair and silk. When it reached Europe through Crusader-era trade, the word entered Old French as camelot and Middle English as camlet. Somewhere in transit, European speakers assumed the word was related to 'camel' — a false etymology that stuck because the fabric was, in fact, sometimes made from camel hair.

Camlet was a prestige textile. Inventories of the English royal wardrobe from the 1200s through the 1500s list camlet cloaks, camlet doublets, and camlet hangings. The fabric could be stiff and waterproof (when made from tightly woven goat hair) or soft and lustrous (when blended with silk). Marco Polo, passing through Anatolia around 1271, noted the region's fine camlet production. It was among the most valued trade goods on the route between Constantinople and London.

By the 1600s, European weavers in Norwich, Brussels, and Leiden were producing their own camlets from worsted wool, imitating the Eastern originals. The imported fabric became a domestic product, and the word gradually lost its exotic associations. Samuel Pepys mentions camlet in his diary — he bought a camlet cloak in 1660 and was pleased with it. The fabric was respectable, middle-class, and thoroughly anglicized.

Camlet disappeared from English vocabulary by the 1800s, replaced by newer fabric names. The word 'camelot' survived only in Arthurian legend — and even there, the connection to fabric is debated. Some etymologists believe the mythical Camelot may derive from the same root: a place associated with fine textiles. If so, King Arthur's capital is named after a bolt of cloth.