A rope or cord stretched between two points on which wet clothes are hung to dry.
Compound word: 'clothes' (from Old English clathes, plural of cloth) + 'line' (from Old English lin via Latin linea). The compound term emerged in the 18th century as clotheslines became common in households.
Before electric dryers were invented, the clothesline was so essential to daily life that it became a symbol of domesticity and hard work—and now that dryers are common in developed countries, clotheslines have paradoxically become symbols of environmental consciousness, showing how the same object can mean completely different things across time.
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