Tangled, matted wool or coarse fiber that gets caught in wool or fleece during processing, considered a defect in textile production.
Possibly from Old English or Low German origins relating to locks of wool. The word is primarily used in textile manufacturing and remains largely specialized vocabulary in the wool industry.
Haslock is one of those wonderfully specific words that reveals entire industries—textile workers needed precision language to describe different fiber problems, and this word survived because it solved a real communication problem.
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