Word of the day · Sunday, November 1, 2026

pilch

noun

An old word for an outer garment made of skin or leather. Later, in British use, a flannel cover worn over a baby's diaper.

Where it comes from

Old English pylece, from Medieval Latin pellicia, made of skin, from pellis, skin or hide.

Worth knowing

The same Latin root gives pelisse, a fur-lined cloak, and pelt. Words for clothing often outlive the clothing they named.

By the letters

• 5letters
• 1vowels (A E I O U)
• noneuncommon letters
• 5different letters

Playing it

PILCH ends in -LCH, a cluster shared by only about a dozen words in a large dictionary, including FILCH, GULCH, MULCH and ZILCH.

One letter away

Words you get by changing a single letter, the steps of a word ladder.

• filch
• hilch
• milch
• pinch
• pitch
• zilch

In Unsaid

PILCH was word of the day number 14 in Unsaid, a falling-letter word game where every player gets the same word on the same date. As a word it scores 500 points. Under the current rules, spelling it as the word of the day is worth a bonus of 9,000 reading down or 6,750 reading across, before any streak. How the bonus works.