The word was recorded in English by 1611, formed from native Germanic roots. The lexicographer Randle Cotgrave, in A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, used it to describe a ball of yarn.
Formed within Old English rather than borrowed from another language, it drew on a Proto-Germanic root already in use before the Norman Conquest. The same root ran through Old Saxon and Dutch, each carrying its own form of the word for a rolled ball. John Gower used it in 1393, in Confessio Amantis, a major work of Middle English poetry, though the spelling in surviving editions has since been modernised from his own.
Behind the Germanic root, *kliwjo-, lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *gleu-, meaning to gather into a mass. The philologist Julius Pokorny connects this same root to gloutos, the Greek word for the rump.
CLOD and CLOUD share the same root. CLOD was formed in Old English, first meaning a lump of earth, before later meaning a foolish, dull-witted person. CLOUD was also formed in Old English, meaning a mass of rock, or a hill, only later shifting to name the shapes in the sky.
By the early seventeenth century the word named the thread that led a person safely out of a maze, or a labyrinth. Charlotte Brontë, writing in 1849, used the same word for a single piece of evidence, and by 1914 the New York World had created a new editorial feature around it.
