Fabric is cloth made by weaving or knitting threads together. Your t-shirt, jeans, bedsheets, and curtains are all made from fabric. Different fabrics have different qualities: cotton fabric feels soft and breathable, wool fabric keeps you warm, and synthetic fabrics like polyester dry quickly after getting wet.

Making fabric has been one of humanity's most important crafts for thousands of years. Before factories, people spent enormous amounts of time spinning thread and weaving it into fabric by hand. The invention of mechanical looms during the Industrial Revolution made fabric much cheaper and more available, transforming how people lived.

Fabric can also mean the basic structure or framework of something. When people talk about the fabric of society, they mean the fundamental connections and shared values that hold a community together, like threads woven into cloth. A teacher might say that honesty and respect are part of the fabric of a good classroom. Scientists talk about the fabric of space-time when describing the universe's fundamental structure. In this sense, fabric means the essential foundation that everything else is built on.