tapestry

Middle English tapiestre, from Old French tapisserie (“tapestry”).

• IPA^(key): /ˈtæpəstɹi/, [ˈtæpəst͡ʃɹi]

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tapestry (countable and uncountable, plural tapestries)

1. A heavy woven cloth, often with decorative pictorial designs, normally hung on walls.
   • 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 3, in The China Governess‎:

     Sepia Delft tiles surrounded the fireplace, their crudely drawn Biblical scenes in faded cyclamen blending with the pinkish pine, while above them, instead of a mantelshelf, there was an archway high enough to form a balcony with slender balusters and a tapestry-hung wall behind.

2. (by extension) Anything with variegated or complex details.
   • 2013 January-February, Nancy Langston, “The Fraught History of a Watery World”, in American Scientist‎, volume 101, number 1, page 59:

     European adventurers found themselves within a watery world, a tapestry of streams, channels, wetlands, lakes and lush riparian meadows enriched by floodwaters from the Mississippi River.

tapestry (third-person singular simple present tapestries, present participle tapestrying, simple past and past participle tapestried)

1. (transitive, intransitive) To decorate with tapestry, or as if with a tapestry.
   • 1833, Adolphus Slade, Records of Travels in Turkey, Greece, &c.‎, Captain Pasha's Alarm, page 152:

     We had run above twenty miles when the sun set, carpeting the sea, and tapestrying the sky with a rare unison of delicate green and golden hues […]

   • 1854 September 13, Nathaniel Hawthorne, English Note-Books‎, Conway Castle:

     The banqueting-hall, all open to the sky, and with thick curtains of ivy tapestrying the walls, and grass and weeds growing on the arches that overpass it, is indescribably beautiful.

   • 1921, Israel Zangwill, The Cockpit: Romantic Drama in Three Acts‎, page 255:

     I present Bosnavina to its Duchess, I kiss the hem of her Majesty's robe and will tapestry her Palace with conquered flags.

• tapetum lucidum

• spattery, tryptase