vellous

Definite, various forms lie behind these words. The basic Latin form villosus 'hairy, hairy thing' is an adjective from villus (q.v.) 'hair', which comes from the same root as Latin vellus (q.v.) 'wool, fleece'. In post-Classical Latin there was a variant of the adjective, villutus, which gives the OF/AF forms velu, veluz, etc. 'hairy'. The words in Latin and French could be used both as adjectives and substantives (thus 'something with a hairy texture'), and in French came also to refer to kinds of cloth, originally hairy, but later which were fairly soft to the touch (for a parallel development, consider Latin saeta 'hairy material' > French soie 'silk'). The various word-forms were also influenced by knowledge of Latin vellus 'fleece'. The variant Latin adjective villutus is the source of the word velvet (q.v.). The term for the fabric in Old French was velos, which does not appear in the AND, except as veluse (the present cited gloss equating veluses:lodices). That the fabric term 'vellous' does not appear in Middle English or Older Scots until the15th century suggests that it may not have been current in Anglo-French, and was borrowed into Scots from continental Middle French (the single Middle English instance of vellis may be the same word, or a reflex of an unattested Anglo-French term). On the Continent, the word velos, velous was modified to velours 'velvet', which is the current Modern French term; this was borrowed as the English noun velure in the late 16th century, later velours (current English 'velour' is not a form given in the OED, and therefore post-dates 1916, when the entry for velours was last updated).