The Etymology of Trellis
Trellis began as cloth, not wood. Latin trilix (three-threaded) named a kind of coarse fabric woven on a three-shaft loom — the same word ultimately gives us drill (the cloth, from German Drillich, also a three-threaded weave) and possibly twill (a different but related weaving structure). In Old French trelis kept this textile sense but gradually expanded: the visual logic of crossed threads in fabric was applied to crossed slats in carpentry, and by the 14th century trelis could mean either a coarse cloth or a wooden lattice. English borrowed only the wooden sense around 1400 and forgot the textile meaning entirely. French still has both: a treillis is a garden trellis or, equally, a soldier's fatigue uniform — preserving in modern French the very same double sense that English lost six hundred years ago.