coverlid


Also found in: Thesaurus.

cov·er·let

 (kŭv′ər-lĭt) also cov·er·lid (-lĭd)
n.
A bedspread.

[Middle English coverlite, from Anglo-Norman coverelyth : Old French covrir, to cover; see cover + Old French lit, bed (from Latin lēctus; see legh- in Indo-European roots).]
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
References in classic literature ?
Didn't that Dough-Boy, the steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man's hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it?
Five minutes did not elapse between the moment of enclosing the animals and that of unscrewing the coverlid of their prison.
An elegant polished walnut-shell served Thumbelina as a cradle, the blue petals of a violet were her mattress, and a rose-leaf her coverlid. There she lay at night, but in the day-time she used to play about on the table; here the woman had put a bowl, surrounded by a ring of flowers, with their stalks in water, in the middle of which floated a great tulip pedal, and on this Thumbelina sat, and sailed from one side of the bowl to the other, rowing herself with two white horse-hairs for oars.
`Here are your clean clothes,' she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as she talked.
She was bending eagerly over the woman to hear her reply; but drew back, instinctively, as she once again rose, slowly and stiffly, into a sitting posture; then, clutching the coverlid with both hands, muttered some indistinct sounds in her throat, and fell lifeless on the bed.
The inspection ended with general satisfaction, when each returned to watch space through the side windows and the lower glass coverlid.
I waited a moment, looking at her from behind her pillow, as she lay beneath me, with one arm and hand resting on the white coverlid, so still, so quietly breathing, that the frill on her night-dress never moved-- I waited, looking at her, as I have seen her thousands of times, as I shall never see her again--and then stole back to my room.