cloth-ears
(UK, dated, informal, derogatory) A person who cannot hear clearly or who fails to pay attention to what is said.
Definitions
(UK, dated, informal, derogatory) A person who cannot hear clearly or who fails to pay attention to what is said. Its origin is in the wool and cotton mills of Northern England where the noise of the machinery and build-up of cotton dust made it difficult to hear people speaking. The earliest example in print is.
Comments
Used in
Have a better definition?
Add your own interpretation of "cloth-ears".
⚡About Tech, Dev & AI slang
The vocabulary of software engineers, AI researchers, and anyone living in a terminal or on GitHub — from LLM to MCP, CORS to vibe coding, agentic to enshittification.
See all Tech, Dev & AI slang on Slangora.
Tags
Other words near "cloth-ears" (C)
Browse all slang words starting with C.
Related terms
People also read
Semantically related
- cloth-eared80%
Not hearing clearly.
- cloth-eared76%
Failing to pay attention.
- hard ears62%
A Caribbean English expression describing a refusal to listen, obey, or take advice — the quality of being willfully deaf to instruction or warning. Used especially of children who won't do as they're told, but also of stubborn adults. 'Hard-ears' carries an implication of deliberate defiance rather than simple mishearing, and it functions as both a noun and an adjective in Caribbean usage.
- hard ears62%
(Caribbean) A refusal to listen or obey.
- pin one's ears back59%
(UK, informal) To listen attentively.