counterpane

By serial alterations in Middle English, Middle French, and Old French, ultimately from Latin words meaning "stitched bedding" (culcita puncta).

counterpane (plural counterpanes)

1. The topmost covering of a bed, often functioning as a blanket.

   Near-synonyms: bedcover, bedspread, coverlet

   • 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “The counterpane”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:

     Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade—owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times—this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me. […] I now strove to rouse him—"Queequeg!"—but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! "Queequeg!—in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!" At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him.

   • 1915, W.S. Maugham, Of Human Bondage:

     When he had got a light he saw that she had taken away all her things and the baby's .. and all the things on the washing-stand had been broken, a knife had been drawn cross-ways through the seats of the two chairs, the pillow had been slit open, there were large gashes in the sheets and the counterpane, the looking-glass appeared to have been broken with a hammer.

   • 1941 September, Charles E. Lee, “Sheltering in London Tube Stations”, in Railway Magazine, page 389:

     [...] the Westminster City Council has arranged with a large firm of launderers to wash blankets, sheets, pillow cases, and counterpanes, at low standard prices, and to return them the same day.

   • 1949, George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, TWO.VII:

         He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-smelling room that seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane. [...]
         [...] His mind went back to another dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother had sat on the dingy white-quilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him and drowning deeper every minute, but still looking up at him in the darkening water.

• “counterpane”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.