A sheer fabric, then a dressing
In present-day English, gauze is a thin cloth with a loose, open weave. Light passes through it. Dressmakers still cut it for veils, summer layers, and curtains; a bleached cotton version is the familiar pad or roll that covers a wound. The same idea of an open mesh has been extended to wire and plastic screens, and, more loosely, to mist or haze hanging over a landscape. None of these uses is native Old English vocabulary. The origin of the word gauze is a French borrowing whose older trail never quite settles.
English takes a French cloth-name
The noun entered English in the mid-sixteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence is from 1561; Merriam-Webster gives the same year for the thin-fabric sense. Other handbooks group first use in the 1560s, and early spellings such as gais still show the French vowel. There is no Germanic prefix or suffix to unpack: English borrowed the whole word.
French already had gaze a century earlier. A 1461 inventory of furnishings at the Hôtel de Faye lists a man’s robe of gaze, so the French term named a luxury textile long before English writers used it and long before it meant a surgical dressing. Spanish gasa, German Gaze, Dutch gaas, Danish gaze, Polish gaza, and Russian gaz sit in the same family. Historical dictionaries treat those forms as loans from French, not as independent inventions. Italian garza belongs nearby.
How the cloth and the name reached western Europe is less tidy than that list. Medieval Latin already shows related shapes: garza at Bologna in 1250 and at Rome in 1361, and gazzatum at Budapest in 1279. The object moved with Mediterranean trade; the exact port of linguistic entry is not agreed. Spanish is a useful check. Its s rather than z has been read as a sign that gasa did not pass through the Arabic of medieval Spain, but arrived later by commerce. American Heritage allows that French gaze may have come, perhaps by way of Spanish, from an Arabic silk-word. The commercial route is clearer than any single donor form.
Two older accounts, neither closed
Beyond French, the trail splits. One long-standing guess ties the cloth to Gaza, the Levantine city. Goods often carry place-names: damask from Damascus, muslin from Mosul. Klein, Du Cange, and a popular tradition treat Gaza as the source. The Century Dictionary already called that link a conjecture. The French Trésor (CNRTL) adds that an ancient textile industry at Gaza is not securely documented. Later writers have connected Palestinian silk weaving with European gaze, and Pliny described a thin stuff associated with the region, but those historical notes do not prove that the French or English noun is the city name.
The better-supported rival is Arabic qazz, a word for silk, raw silk, or silk waste. Barnhart favored this, and several modern dictionaries follow. Qazz is not a native Semitic root for the fiber. It was taken from Iranian, through Aramaic in the account given by Wiktionary, with a New Persian relative kaž meaning bent or crooked and, by extension, low-grade silk. Arabic also has a related loan khazz for silk. Joan Corominas, writing on Spanish gasa, judged Arabic qazz — itself from Persian kazz — the probable western source, because in some Arabic dialects the word names coarse silk, cocoons, or unprepared silk, a fit for a light, open fabric that a city label with no firm trail does not match.
None of this is settled. There is still no decisive evidence for either story. A 1903 suggestion from a Norman plant-name and a 1983 proposal from dialectal Greek khassa (a skin or thick garment) have been offered as sources for Middle French gaze; they remain minority ideas. The cautious position is that English gauze is French, that French gaze is probably an Arabic silk-word of Persian origin, and that the Gaza story is a tempting folk etymology that has never been demonstrated.
From court cloth to cotton and mist
Early English use was about dress and furnishings: a sheer silk or similar open weave, sometimes with metal thread in the French tradition. The medical sense — loosely woven cotton used to clean or cover a wound — is a later specialization of the same texture, not a new root. Once the weave, not the fiber, defined the word, metal and plastic meshes could share the name, and writers could speak of a gauze of mist without any cloth in the scene. The adjective gauzy is the ordinary English -y formation on the noun. A verb meaning to wrap with the dressing, or, in literary use, to film over like mist, is secondary.
English gaze, the verb for a long look, is unrelated. That word comes from Middle English gasen and a Germanic family. The similar spelling is a coincidence that sometimes pulls the two together in folk thinking.
The date that pins the loan
If one fact should stay attached to the English noun, it is the French inventory of 1461 sitting beside the English citations of 1561. English did not invent the name for this open cloth. It imported a French luxury term a hundred years after that term is already on a robe, then spent later centuries stretching the name from silk veils to sterile cotton and to haze. The deeper Iranian-Arabic silk word may well stand behind French gaze. The step that made the English form is the sixteenth-century borrowing, dated and ordinary, of a French noun.