[A trade name originating in an accidental misreading of tweel, Sc. form of TWILL (or a misunderstanding of an abbreviated tweeled TWILLED a.1), helped by association with the River Tweed.
The form appears to have originated in or about 1831, but published statements are not quite in accord as to the circumstances which gave rise to it. The more important of these accounts are to be found in Jas. Locke’s Tweed & Don (1860), 37, in a paper by D. Watson in Trans. Hawick Archæol. Soc. (1868), 14, and in A. Barlow’s Weaving (1878), 49. Barlow and others attribute the misreading of the word to Jas. Locke himself (who was a London merchant), but Locke in his own book does not claim to have been the originator of the name, which had become fully current by 1850.]
A twilled woollen cloth of somewhat rough surface, and of great variety of texture, originally and still chiefly made in the south of Scotland (usually of two or more colors combined in the same yarn); inferior kinds are made of wool with a mixture of shoddy or cotton. In pl., cloths or garments of this kind.
1847. McCulloch, Acc. Brit. Empire (ed. 3), I. 667. Narrow cloths, of various kinds, known by the name of Tweeds,… are extensively produced at Galashiels and Jedburgh, but especially at the former. They used, also, to be produced in considerable quantities at Hawick.
1859. Jephson, Brittany, i. 5. A suit of stout grey tweed.
1859. Sala, Tw. round Clock (1861), 91. Lank office-boys, in … corduroys and tweeds too short, and jackets … too short for them.
1869. C. Gibbon, R. Gray, iv. Garments of rough home-spun tweed.
1882. Caulfeild & Saward, Dict. Needlework, 505. Tweed, a woollen cloth woven of short lengths of wool, and lightly felted and milled, the yarn being dyed before woven. It is soft, durable, and flexible.
1894. Fenn, In Alpine Valley, I. 186. We do look disreputable enough in our rough tweeds.
b. attrib. and Comb., as tweed cap, cloth, clothes, finisher, mill, suit, trousering, -weaving; tweed-clad, -covered, -suited adjs.
1857. Catal. Gt. Exhib., III. 495/1. Specimens of Scotch tweed trouserings. Ibid., 497/2. Striped and Tweed cloth.
1864. Fraser’s Mag., April, 494. A young gentleman in tweed suit and wideawake.
1865. Alex. Smith, Summ. Skye, i. 37. Tweed-clad tourists are everywhere.
1877. Mar. M. Grant, Sun-maid, i. His tweed-stalking-cap was drawn over his eyes.
1888. Daily News, 26 Sept., 7/1. A tweed finisher, employed at Dunsdale mill.
1890. E. Warren, Laughing Eyes, 61. Tweed-suited monthly-return-ticket visitors.
