The name “terry” comes from the French word “tirer” which means to pull out, referring to the pile loops which were pulled out by hand to make absorbent traditional Turkish toweling. Latin “vellus”, meaning hair, has the derivation “velour”, which is the toweling with cut loops.

A woven towel consists of five parts. These are the pile area, fringes, beginning and end part, selvage & border. Every towel does not have to contain all these parts. The pile area is the absorbent part of the towel. Fringes are a tied or an untied tassled part which are left unwoven at the beginning and the end edges of the towel. The beginning and end sections are the tightly woven areas of a towel which come before or after the pile fabric part, in a flat weave construction that prevents the pile area from unraveling. The selvage has the purpose to reinforce the towel sides, and contains fewer number of warp ends than the pile area, for example 90 comparing to 4000 total warp ends.