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mat

nounverbnounnounverbnounnounadjectivenounnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//mæt//
  • United States//mæt//
  • United States/[mæʔ(t̚)]/

A flat piece of coarse material used for wiping one’s feet, or as a decorative or protective floor covering.

noun

  1. 1

    A flat piece of coarse material used for wiping one’s feet, or as a decorative or protective floor covering.

    Wipe your feet on the mat before coming in.

  2. 2

    A small flat piece of material used to protect a surface from anything hot or rough; a coaster.

    They put mats on the table during mealtimes.

  3. 3

    A floor pad to protect athletes.

    The high jumper cleared the bar and landed safely on the mat.

  4. 4

    A thickly tangled mess.

    a mat of weeds

    But to return to where we left her, I see her still, propped up in a kind of stupor against one of the walls in which this wretched edifice abounds, her long grey greasy hair framing in its cowl of scrofulous mats a face where pallor, languor, hunger, acne, recent dirt, immemorial chagrin and surplus hair seemed to dispute the mastery.

    and now only a sord of Mallards drifted through the dense mats of New Zealand pigmyweed that coated the surface of the water.

  5. 5

    A thin layer of woven, non-woven, or knitted fiber that serves as reinforcement to a material.

  6. 6

    A thin surface layer; superficial cover.

    Iceland moss growing in a mat

Etymology

Etymology tree Old English meatte Middle English matte English mat Inherited from Middle English matte (“mat”), from Old English meatte (“mat”), from Late Latin matta (“mat made of rushes”), from Punic or Phoenician (compare Hebrew מיטה \ מִטָּה (mitá, “bed, couch”)). Cognate with German Matte (“mat”), Danish måtte (“mat”), Faroese and Icelandic motta (“rug, mat”), Norwegian matte (“mat, rug”), Swedish matta (“carpet, rug, mat”).

verb

  1. 1

    To cover, protect or decorate with mats.

    Be careful now to keep the Doors and Windows of your Conservatories well matted

  2. 2

    To form a thick, tangled mess; to interweave into, or like, a mat; to entangle.

    And o'er his eyebrows hung his matted hair.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of materialslangClipping of material.

    I used up all my mats cranking 90s and ended up getting one-pumped.

    Using a Weapon Upgrade Bench, it's possible to upgrade a Common Shotgun, for example, all the way to Legendary provided you've harvested enough mats to do so.

    While there are game modes where you can build without any requirements, you'll need to harvest materials to build in normal Fortnite games. Mats is the shortened version of materials.

    Fortnite added a new trap with the Armored Wall reinforcement for mats and one viral TikTok showed just how deadly the new item can be in a close fight.

noun

  1. 1

    An alloy of copper, tin, iron, etc.; white metal.

  2. 2

    Variant of matteAlternative form of matte (“instrument for producing a dull, lustreless surface”).

Etymology

Compare matte.

verb

  1. 1

    Variant of matteAlternative form of matte (“to produce a dull, lustreless surface on metal”).

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of matineedatedAbbreviation of matinee (“performance at a theater”).

    A gents' toilet room might be found in a house that caters for the cheaper class of theatrical patronage, where the slangy language of the "goin' to the mat this aft?" style prevails. A gents toilet room is not found in the Southern Hotel. It either "men's" or "gentlemen's".

Etymology

Etymology tree French matinée English matineeclip. English mat A clipped form of matinee.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of matteAlternative spelling of matte (“decorative border around a picture”).

    the mat of a daguerreotype

adjective

  1. 1

    Variant of matteAlternative form of matte (“not reflecting light”).

    Frons mat black, orbits slightly paler, more greyish; mesonotum distinctly mat, greyish-black, but with some subshine; […]

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of matrixClipping of matrix.

noun

  1. 1

    Vulgar, obscene, or profane language in Russian and some other Slavic language communities.

    Most teenagers go through times when they use mat "rather heavily" among themselves. I guess they associate it with being adults. In most cases though this goes away pretty fast, usually when they start dating girls. Using mat rather heavily after graduating from university is a differnet^([sic]) matter.

    Don't you people have anything better to do than collecting mat. I still can't undestand why people in (and from) the ex-USSR like to swear so much.

    As the Russian mentality (hopefully) will be less medieval, mat will lose its social role. It will be less frequently used in the spoken language. From the other hand, books will lose its medieval sacrality, and mat will be allowed to be printed.

Etymology

Borrowed from Russian мат (mat), abbreviated from the expression ма́терная брань (máternaja branʹ), ultimately from мать (matʹ, “mother”).

Forms

plural
mats
past tense
matted
past participle
matted
present participle
matting
third person singular
mats
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).