Meaning & use
charpie
Last updated
Meaning
noununcountablearchaicmedical
Soft shredded linen or cloth that was once picked apart into loose threads and packed into wounds as a dressing.
Grammar: Used without a: they packed the wound with charpie.
Patterns
- charpie for something
Nurses in the field hospital pulled old sheets apart to make charpie for the wounded.
The surgeon pressed charpie against the cut to slow the bleeding.
Families once saved scraps of worn linen to be turned into charpie for the army.
Common combinations
- make charpie
- Women gathered each evening to make charpie from old bedsheets.
- charpie dressing
- A charpie dressing was laid over the wound and bound with a bandage.
- scrape charpie
- Volunteers would scrape charpie from linen cloth with their fingernails.
- roll of charpie
- A roll of charpie sat beside the surgeon's tools.
Synonyms and how they differ
- lint
- Lint is the usual English word for the soft dressing material, and charpie sounds more French and historical.
- gauze
- Gauze is a thin woven fabric used in modern dressings, while charpie was loose picked threads.
- padding
- Padding is a general cushioning term and does not suggest the shredded linen quality of charpie.
Word family
Commonly confused: charpie or sharpie?
charpie vs sharpie
Sharpie is a brand of marker pen, and the sound is different from charpie. Do not mix them up in writing.
Practice
In a story about a nineteenth-century battlefield hospital, what would charpie be used for?
Choose one answer.
Charpie was soft shredded linen used as a wound dressing. The other uses do not fit its medical meaning.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “charpie”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.