serge: [14] The textile term serge is first cousin to silk. It comes via Old French sarge from *sārica, a Vulgar Latin alteration of Latin sērica. This was short for lāna sērica, which meant literally ‘wool of the Seres’. Seres was a name given to a people living in what we would now call China, and it is also the ultimate source of the word silk. => silk
