Wearing clouts (ragged clothing or patches); tattered or ragged; poorly clothed or patched.
From 'clout' (Old English 'clūt,' meaning a patch of cloth, nail, or blow) plus '-ed' suffix. The sense evolved from referring to clothing made of patches, emphasizing poverty or raggedness.
The word 'clout' has wild semantic range—from 'a piece of cloth' to 'a nail' to 'a blow' to 'political power'—and this fragmentation reveals how words can diverge into completely separate meanings once they're unrelated in usage; modern 'clout' (influence) and medieval 'clout' (patch) are almost unrecognizable as the same word.
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