Note: The English word apparently first occurs in Samuel Pullein's The Culture of Silk: Or, an Essay on its Rational Practice and Improvement (London, 1758). Pullein is unclear as to his sources, but he seems to have been familiar with silk production and the cultivation of mulberry trees in southeastern France and northwestern Italy. He uses the word both as an independent noun and in the collocation floss silk, which corresponds to French soie floche, Occitan sedo flusso (thus in Mistral, Lou tresor dóu Felibrige), and Italian seta floscia. French floche, which on phonetic grounds is unlikely to be the direct source of the English word, is traced to Gascon in Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, though Gascony was not a major center of silk production.