purl

1. 1.

   gold or silver wire thread

   Broaderthread
2. 2.

   a basic knitting stitch made by putting the needle through the front of the stich from the righthand side

   Synonymspurl stitch

   Broaderknitting stitch

Other forms of purl

plural

purls·

past tense

purled·

present participle

purling·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about purl

What does purl mean?

purl means "flow in a circular current, of liquids". That is the primary sense; the word has 7 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in purl?

purl has 1 syllable under the regular spelling rules, and is not divided further. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for purl?

Close synonyms include eddy, whirlpool, swirl, whirl, sough. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is purl a common word?

purl is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.