Cotton (On) To.






  1. How curiously fascinating. The sense of the word nearly seems like velcro–a sticky attraction.

  2. There seems to be a possible logical progression from the older(?) sense of cotton as ‘ A woollen fabric of the nature of frieze’ – frieze being ‘A kind of coarse woollen cloth, with a nap, usually on one side only’

    Then you get ‘cottoning well’ in a literal sense – cloth ‘form[ing] or tak[ing] on a nap’, and in various figurative senses of specific things which ‘cotton well’ when they’re doing what they’re supposed to, before you get into cottoning together and cottoning on and so on.

    (Quotes from OED)

  3. In Ireland I’ve only ever heard the idiom used in the sense “get to know or understand something”.

  4. Likewise Britain; to “cotton on” is to realise what’s going on. “Unaware that the service had been cancelled, Mark had been standing at the deserted bus stop for over an hour before he cottoned on.”

  5. “Cottoned on”, in the sense of “realised what’s going on”, is very like “caught on”.

  6. Yes, it is. I wonder if there was an antique past participle form of the verb “caughten”? As in “Yes, he’s caughten on to it now”.

  7. It’s very unlikely. The vowels of caught and cot(ton) are only the same in the western U.S. and Canada, not anywhere else in the anglophone world.

  8. While at it, the etymology of cotter (as in cotter-pin, a pin which keeps a wheel from moving off its axle) is marked as ‘completely unknown’, perhaps by way of cotterel. I have no idea about that one either.

  9. David Marjanović says:

    not anywhere else in the anglophone world

    Unless you want to count Scotland – on which the American merger has occasionally been blamed.

  10. Oops, yes, of course Scotland too.

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