Carpet widths still follow factory looms, not room whims
Carpets and rugs are textile floor covers with a pile layer on a backing—traditionally wool in Europe, now often polypropylene, nylon, or polyester. U.S. broadloom commonly runs 12 or 15 feet wide; European rolls favour 4 or 5 metres for wall-to-wall cuts.
English rug appears in the 1550s for coarse fabric, from Scandinavian roots akin to Norwegian rugga.
Carpet entered English in the late 13th century meaning a coarse cloth, and by the mid-14th century a tablecloth or bedspread, from Old French carpite and a Medieval Latin or Old Italian word for thick woollen cloth. The two terms overlap, though carpet more often means fitted wall-to-wall covering, a trend since the 19th century, while rugs are smaller and loose-laid. Carpets cushion sitting and kneeling and insulate against sound and heat better than tile or stone.
Methods include loom weaving, producing cut-pile plush or looped Berber, flat weaves such as kilim and soumak, and knotted pile tied with symmetrical Turkish or asymmetrical Persian knots in centres from Tabriz to Lahore and Kashmir. Tufting, in which a gun injects pile into a backing later bonded to hessian or a synthetic, is the commonest method for domestic carpet, while needle-felted synthetic fibres make tough coverings for hotels and restaurants. Hooked rugs pull strips of cloth through burlap, and embroidered carpets were traditionally stitched at home by royal and aristocratic women.
Nylon and polypropylene account for an estimated 90% of the commercial market. Nylon wears excellently and takes dye easily, polypropylene is cheaper but hard to dye, and wool, durable yet costly, is often blended 80% to 20% with synthetic fibre. Polyester PET became more competitive when raw material prices rose in the early 2000s, and PTT, patented in 1941, reached production only in the 1990s.
Source: Carpet
