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pongee (pon-JEE, PON-jee) - n., a light slub-woven fabric, usually raw silk but sometimes cotton or rayon.
Slub-woven fabrics use yarns of varying thickness, made by varying the strength of the twist -- sometimes the thicker parts are large enough to be noticeable, producing slubs. The word's been used in English since around 1710 and, given it was known from being a Chinese export, it's clearly taken from some Chinese dialect -- and given the era, I'd expect it to be Cantonese-or-related because Western merchants traded in southern China, but most dictionaries instead claim it's from Mandarin 本机, běnjī, glossed as meaning "one's own loom." Even aside from the question of what Westerners were hearing any Mandarin (which was the Beijing dialect), 本机 isn't actually a word in Mandarin. I mean, it can be understood as one's own machine, but 机 in itself doesn't mean loom, but any kind of machine -- loom is 织布机, zhībùjī. One dictionary hedges their bet with a perhaps and puts an asterisk of unattestation in front of běnjī, but still. OED claims it's from Mandarin, either běnjī, home-loom, or běnzhī, home-woven (presumably 本织), and that last is the only one that remotely makes sense.
---L.
Slub-woven fabrics use yarns of varying thickness, made by varying the strength of the twist -- sometimes the thicker parts are large enough to be noticeable, producing slubs. The word's been used in English since around 1710 and, given it was known from being a Chinese export, it's clearly taken from some Chinese dialect -- and given the era, I'd expect it to be Cantonese-or-related because Western merchants traded in southern China, but most dictionaries instead claim it's from Mandarin 本机, běnjī, glossed as meaning "one's own loom." Even aside from the question of what Westerners were hearing any Mandarin (which was the Beijing dialect), 本机 isn't actually a word in Mandarin. I mean, it can be understood as one's own machine, but 机 in itself doesn't mean loom, but any kind of machine -- loom is 织布机, zhībùjī. One dictionary hedges their bet with a perhaps and puts an asterisk of unattestation in front of běnjī, but still. OED claims it's from Mandarin, either běnjī, home-loom, or běnzhī, home-woven (presumably 本织), and that last is the only one that remotely makes sense.
---L.
