mukhayyar

Mohair comes from Turkish tiftik, but the word English uses derives from Arabic mukhayyar, meaning 'choice, select, superior' — from the root khayara, 'to choose, to prefer.' The Arabic word named a fine fabric woven from the long, silky hair of the Angora goat, a breed native to the region around Ankara in central Anatolia (Turkey). The fabric was called mukhayyar because it was the best, the chosen, the preferred — a word of quality assessment rather than material description. It reached European languages through Italian moccaiaro and Spanish mohair in the sixteenth century, arriving in English as 'mohair' by the early seventeenth century.

The Angora goat (Capra hircus aegagrus) produces fleece that is fundamentally different from the undercoat fibers of cashmere goats. Where cashmere is the downy undercoat of a cold-climate animal, mohair is the outer fleece — long, lustrous, extremely smooth fibers with minimal scales, which gives mohair its characteristic sheen and its resistance to felting. Mohair's luster rivals silk; its strength exceeds most wool by a significant margin; and its fiber diameter, at 25–45 microns depending on the goat's age and the season of shearing, produces a fabric that ranges from delicate kid mohair (the finest, from young goats' first shearing) to the heavier adult mohair used in upholstery and outerwear. The fiber's optical properties — the way it reflects light along its smooth surface — make mohair garments visually distinctive, glowing rather than absorbing the light.

Turkey maintained a near-monopoly on Angora goat breeding for centuries, and mohair was one of the Ottoman Empire's prized export commodities. In 1849, the first Angora goats were exported to South Africa, and later to the United States. By the late nineteenth century, the Karoo region of South Africa had become one of the world's major mohair-producing regions, a position it still holds. The fiber's production geography had shifted from Anatolia to the Southern Hemisphere, but the Arabic word for 'the chosen fabric' had traveled ahead and established itself in every European language before the goats moved.

English speakers, hearing 'mohair,' could not help constructing an etymology from the familiar word 'hair.' Mohair is made of hair; calling it 'mo-hair' suggested 'more hair' or simply emphasized that it was a hair fiber, as opposed to a wool (which is technically also hair but with a more elaborate scale structure). This folk etymology, while incorrect, is not entirely wrong: mohair is distinguished from wool precisely by the character of its fiber, the smoothness and length and luster of what is, in fact, a hair rather than a wool in the technical sense. The Arabic 'chosen' and the English 'hair' have conspired to make a word that is doubly appropriate for a fiber defined by its quality and its nature.