wull

Old English wull comes from Proto-Germanic *wullō, from Proto-Indo-European *h₂wĺ̥h₁neh₂ (wool). The PIE root connects English 'wool' to Latin vellus (fleece), lāna (wool, via an alternative form), Greek lḗnos (wool), and Sanskrit ūrṇā (wool). The word is remarkably stable across the Indo-European family, which reflects the antiquity of sheep domestication. Sheep were domesticated in Mesopotamia by about 10,000 BCE, and woolly sheep — bred for their fiber rather than their meat — appeared by about 6000 BCE.

Wool made England rich. English wool was the finest in medieval Europe, and its export funded wars, built churches, and shaped foreign policy. The wool trade with Flanders was so important that Edward III placed a woolsack in the House of Lords as a symbol of England's wealth — it is still there. The Lord Chancellor sits on the Woolsack. The word 'wool' is literally embedded in the British constitution.

The Industrial Revolution began with wool and cotton processing. The spinning jenny (1764), the water frame (1769), and the spinning mule (1779) were all developed for textile production. The factory system that transformed the world was built to process fiber — wool and cotton — more efficiently. The word 'wool' names a material that, through its demand for mechanized processing, created industrial capitalism.

The word has accumulated idioms. To pull the wool over someone's eyes, dyed in the wool, woolly thinking, woolly mammoth, woolgathering. In most of these, 'wool' means something fuzzy, indistinct, or deceptive. The material's physical quality — soft, fibrous, tangled — became a metaphor for vagueness. The specific, valuable, economically transformative material became a synonym for fuzzy thinking.