Swatch

The most common results for Swatch on the internet in 2021 are for the firm of Swatch International, a Swiss firm of watchmakers, and their brands. (Their name is a portmanteau word from 'Swiss' + 'watch'.)

• The common noun a swatch - pronounced to rhyme with 'watch' and 'Scotch', IPA: /swɒtʃ/ - means 'a sample', in particular those small pieces, usually square, cut from a cloth for sales staff to show clearly and accurately what they are selling. (People who knit may make swatches to show the quality and size of their work; decorators may leave swatches of paint on a wall or other surface to judge accurately the effect of a given colour on the whole.) A swatch-book is a bound collection of swatches to show the range of a particular product, such as all the colours commercially available of a particular paint, or all the colourways in which, for example, a cloth for upholstery is produced.

Swatch was used in some dialects for swath. This use is obsolete. However, it is not unknown for swatch to be mistakenly used for swath[e], a malapropism.

• A rarer swatch, virtually obsolete now, meant " A passage or channel of water lying between sandbanks or between a sandbank and the shore" (OED, 2019).