60 Fun Facts About Wool

Wool consists mainly of which structural protein, also found in human hair and nails?

Keratin owes its toughness to sulfur: its cysteine units link into disulfide bridges that lock the protein chains together, and the fibre will not dissolve even in hot water.

What does wool do as it absorbs moisture from damp air?

Gives off heat: wool produces warmth as it takes up moisture, so a wool jersey worn from a warm room into a cold, damp night warms its wearer instead of chilling them.

The grease washed out of a raw fleece ends up as the base of which products?

Skin creams: the grease is spun out of the wash water by centrifuge, then refined and bleached until it is pure enough for ointments and cosmetics.

Which knitted wool garment is named after the earl who led the Charge of the Light Brigade?

Cardigan: the garment copies the knitted wool waistcoat British officers are said to have worn in the Crimean War, and the earl's fame after the 1854 charge made it a fashion.

The 'Super' number on a wool suit label grades what?

Fibre fineness: the higher the number, the finer the wool, and finer fibres leave fewer coarse ends poking out of the yarn, which is why a high Super number feels less prickly.

Which form of anthrax, caught from contaminated fleeces, took its common name from a textile-trade job?

Woolsorters' disease is the lung form of anthrax, not the skin form: sorters caught it by breathing in spores shaken loose from contaminated fleeces.

Which type of wool yarn is strong, long-staple and combed, giving a smooth hard surface used in suiting?

Worsted is named after Worstead, the Norfolk village where the cloth was first made; woollen yarn, by contrast, is carded rather than combed, which leaves it soft and fuzzy.

Recycled wool made by tearing apart existing fabric and respinning it is traditionally called what?

Shoddy looked like good broadcloth when new but soon wore shabby, and after it clothed American Civil War armies its name became the everyday word for anything cheaply made.

The presiding officer of the House of Lords sits on a wool-stuffed seat known as what?

Edward III ordered his Lord Chancellor to sit on a wool bale to symbolise how central the wool trade was to England's medieval economy.

Before its 1938 refill with wool, the Lord Chancellor's seat in the Lords had been stuffed with what?

Horsehair had replaced the original filling over the years, so the seat that honours England's wool wealth was re-stuffed with wool given by the International Wool Secretariat.

Smuggling sheep and wool out of England by night, which could once cost a man a hand, was known as what?

Owling probably takes its name from the owl's nocturnal habits; under a 1566 law, a first offender's left hand was cut off and nailed up in a market town.

Which phrase for anxious suspense comes from the wooden frames that stretched wet woollen cloth as it dried?

On tenterhooks: a tenter was the drying frame, and its hooked nails held new cloth taut so it would not shrink; by the 1700s the phrase meant being stretched by suspense.

To prop up the wool trade, a 1571 English law fined most men and boys who went out on Sundays without what?

A woollen cap was compulsory on Sundays and holidays for every male over six except noblemen; the law went in 1597, but the flat cap stayed on as the mark of the working man.

The Egtved Girl, buried around 1370 BC in woollen clothes that still survive, was found in an oak coffin in which country?

Denmark: the sealed oak trunk kept her woollen clothes and blanket intact for over 3,000 years, though of the girl herself only hair, brain, teeth, nails and a little skin remain.

Which English city's Victorian mills earned it the name 'wool capital of the world'?

Bradford was a market town of cottage spinners in 1800; within fifty years soft water, local coal, steam mills and shiploads of Australian fleece had made it the wool capital of the world.

Superwash wool resists shrinking because its treatment smooths or coats what on each fibre?

Scales: they overlap like a ratchet, so fibres rubbed together in the wash slide one way and lock tight, and smoothing them down or sealing them under a thin polymer stops the jumper shrinking.

A merino suit launched by a Japanese retailer in the late 2000s could be cleaned in what unusual way?

In the shower: the wearer rinses odour and dirt off under warm water, and the suit drips dry ready to wear within hours, with no ironing.

England's wish to protect wool exports to the weavers of Flanders helped push it into which war?

The Hundred Years' War began in 1337 partly because Flanders, whose cloth towns lived on English fleeces, answered to a French overlord, and the tax on every exported sack filled Edward III's coffers.

Which napped woollen cloth, made to imitate felt, covers snooker and card tables?

Baize takes its name from the French for bay, a chestnut brown, though the world now knows it in billiard-table green.

Which common English surname is traced to workers who pounded new woollen cloth to thicken it?

Walker probably began as a name for fullers, who thickened new cloth by treading it underfoot, and the same trade left the surnames Fuller and Tucker.

The Merino breed originated in which region, where exporting the sheep was for centuries a crime?

The Iberian Peninsula kept its Merinos under a Spanish royal monopoly, with death for smugglers, until 18th-century kings began sending flocks as diplomatic gifts to courts from Saxony to Sweden.

Merinos sent to France in the 18th century developed into which breed, named after a royal farm?

Rambouillet blood later reshaped the Australian flock: Emperor, a ram bought by the Peppin family, cut about 11 kg of greasy wool a year and helped set the type of the big-framed Peppin Merino.

Which army officer turned grazier is remembered as a founder of Australia's wool industry?

John Macarthur bought into the first Merinos landed at Sydney in 1797, yet he spent most of 1801 to 1817 in England, so his wife Elizabeth and nephew Hannibal ran and built the flock.

Sir Joseph Banks helped found George III's prized royal flock of Spanish Merinos at which royal estate?

Kew made sense because Banks already ran its botanic garden for the king; he went on to write a short book on the Merino, a breed he was instrumental in bringing to England.

Which Scottish town gave its name to the curling teardrop pattern its weavers copied from Kashmir shawls?

Paisley's weavers copied the shawls that British soldiers sent home from India so successfully that by the 1830s the Persian teardrop motif had taken the town's name.

The old rural chore of 'woolgathering', picking snagged tufts of fleece off hedges, now names which habit?

Idle daydreaming: gatherers wandered from bush to bush for very little return, so by the 1550s woolgathering meant letting the mind drift just as aimlessly.

Cashmere comes from the fine winter undercoat of a goat; what is the coarse outer coat called?

Guard hair has to be separated out in a dehairing step before the down can be spun; the stiff outer coat is not wasted, ending up in brushes and coat interfacings.

Mohair is made from the hair of which animal?

Angora goat, not the Angora rabbit, whose fluffier fibre is the one sold as angora; goat, rabbit and the Angora cat all take their name from Ankara in Turkey.

Which country clipped more than half of the world's mohair in the early 2020s?

South Africa inherited a trade Turkey had kept to itself until the 1800s; its flocks graze the dry Karoo, and with neighbouring Lesotho the region clipped about two-thirds of the world's mohair in 2022.

The word 'mohair' traces back to a term for choice haircloth in which language?

Arabic mukhayyar reached English through Italian and French, and its ending was then bent to look like 'hair', which is why the word seems to describe itself.

Angora fibre is much warmer and lighter than sheep's wool because of what feature?

A hollow core traps air inside each fibre, which makes angora feel almost weightless; because the hair has little stretch, it is usually blended with sheep's wool to give the yarn some spring.

Which country was supplying about 90% of the world's angora rabbit fibre by the 2010s?

China came to dominate angora so completely that when footage from its rabbit farms surfaced, dozens of high-street chains, H&M and Calvin Klein among them, dropped the fibre outright.

The vicuña, source of one of the world's priciest fibres, is the national animal of which country?

Peru puts the vicuña on its coat of arms to stand for the nation's wildlife; under the Incas the animals were rounded up, shorn and released, and the fleece was reserved for the nobility.

Qiviut, a downy fibre often likened to cashmere, is the underwool of which animal?

The muskox sheds its qiviut each spring, so the fibre is gathered rather than shorn, and unlike sheep's wool the yarn will not shrink in water of any temperature.

Which type of alpaca grows silky fibre that hangs in long, dreadlock-like locks?

The Suri's fine, silky fleece would grow long enough to touch the ground if it were never shorn; the other breed, the Huacaya, carries a shorter, coarser, fluffier coat.

Lanolin, the wax secreted by sheep, takes its name from Latin words meaning what?

Wool oil: a German physician coined the word in 1885 from Latin lana and oleum, yet the name misleads, because chemically the grease is a wax rather than an oil or a true fat.

Which Native American nation built its celebrated blanket and rug weaving on wool from sheep that Spanish colonists brought?

Navajo weavers probably learned the loom from their Pueblo neighbours, and a steady supply of wool from their own flocks then made the famous blankets possible.

'Dyed in the wool', said of someone whose views never change, refers to wool dyed at which stage?

Before it is spun: loose fleece takes and holds colour far better than cloth dyed in the piece, so the phrase came to describe convictions that will never wash out.

A traditional story says tweed got its name when a merchant misread 'tweel', Scots for twill, as the name of what?

A river: the Tweed runs through the Borders mill country and the cloth was sold under its name by the 1830s, though dictionaries warn that firm evidence for the misreading tale is lacking.

By law, Harris Tweed must be handwoven at islanders' homes in which island group?

The Outer Hebrides' mills prepare the yarn, but every length must go out to a weaver's treadle loom at home before it comes back to be finished and stamped with the Orb.

What is crottle, which Scottish islanders once gathered to dye the wool for their tweeds?

A lichen: islanders scraped grey crottle off the moorland rocks, and it gave the old tweeds their reddish browns.

The Woolmark swirl was launched in 1964 to help wool fight off which new threat?

Synthetic fibres were becoming household names, so the wool industry held a design contest for a pure-wool mark; its credited winner left no other trace and is now thought to be a front for juror Franco Grignani.

Fair Isle knitting became fashionable in the early 1920s after which royal wore its jumpers in public?

The Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, golfed in the patterned pullovers of one remote Shetland island, and the 1920s vogue for them was thanks in part to him.

Which Irish folk group made Aran jumpers their trademark stage outfit in New York at the start of the 1960s?

The Clancy Brothers got them in a parcel from their mother, who had heard how harsh the New York winter was; a 1961 Ed Sullivan Show spot then made the knitwear famous.

Shrek, the merino who dodged shearing for six years, had been hiding where?

In mountain caves near the top of a high-country station; once caught he was shorn on live television in 20 minutes, and his next fleece came off aboard a floating iceberg.

Chris, an overgrown Australian merino rescued in 2015, set a world record with a fleece of roughly what weight?

About 40 kg, some eight times a typical 5 kg fleece; he could barely walk under it, and a champion shearer needed 42 minutes to cut him free under sedation.

The Golden Shears, a shearing championship first staged in 1961, is held in which country?

New Zealand: born in the farming town of Masterton, the Golden Shears turned a farm chore into a spectator sport, and its success spawned sister contests abroad and a world championship.

Britain's Wolseley cars grew out of a firm that Frederick Wolseley set up after inventing what in Australia?

A shearing machine: Herbert Austin ran the firm's Birmingham works, designed the first Wolseley cars there as a sideline, and later left to found the Austin Motor Company.

In Greek myth, the Golden Fleece came from a winged ram that carried Phrixus to which kingdom?

Colchis lay at the far end of the Black Sea; on the way there Phrixus's sister Helle slipped from the ram and drowned in the strait that was named the Hellespont after her.

Hand felters wet the wool with hot water and which everyday product to help the fibres mat together?

Soap and hot water speed the matting as the fibres are rubbed and rolled, which is why a wool jumper put through a hot wash comes out shrunken and felted.

Wool grows from which structures that extend from the epidermis down into the dermis?

Hair follicles: wild sheep grew a coarse, hairy outer coat over a short woolly underlayer, and generations of selective breeding all but eliminated the hair to leave only fleece.

Wool is chosen for firefighters' protective clothing because in a fire it does what instead of melting?

It chars and goes out: wool is far harder to set alight than cotton and will not support a flame, and because it never melts it cannot drip onto the skin as molten synthetics can.

Roughly how many domestic sheep were there in the world around 2020?

About 1.2 billion: sheep were first domesticated some 10,000 years ago for meat, milk and hides, and breeding them for a woolly fleece only came later.

The duffel coat takes its name from the coarse woollen cloth of Duffel, a town in which country?

Belgium: Duffel lies near Antwerp, but the coat owes its fame to Britain's Royal Navy, whose wartime stock was sold off as surplus after 1945 and put the hooded, toggled coat on civilian backs.

Before shears were invented, how was wool removed from sheep?

Plucked by hand or with combs: early sheep shed their coats every spring, so the loosened wool could simply be pulled or combed away, with no blade needed.

Which Flemish city, whose weavers worked English wool, built a vast Cloth Hall that was flattened in the First World War?

Ypres: artillery reduced the 13th-century Cloth Hall and the town around it to rubble, and both were later rebuilt in their original style, the hall as a near-exact copy.

To protect England's weavers, a 1699 law let which neighbour export its wool and cloth only to England?

Ireland: the Wool Act shut Irish wool and cloth out of every foreign market to shield England's own trade, and it went further in America, where colonists could not ship wool even to the colony next door.

Crimp, the natural wave along a wool fibre, is caused by what inside it?

Two kinds of cell: they make up the fibre's cortex, each with a slightly different chemistry, and because the pair never behave quite alike the fibre bends into its waves.

The ceremonial Chilkat robes of Alaska's Tlingit were traditionally woven from cedar bark and the wool of which wild animal?

Mountain goat: the men hunted the goats and painted a pattern board, and the women spun the wool around a core of cedar bark and wove the design from the board.

Which three countries were the largest producers of greasy sheep wool in 2024?

China, Australia and New Zealand led in 2024, but their clips differ: Australia grows mainly fine Merino fleece, so it supplies the largest share of the wool that goes into clothing.