Clothes line
rope stretched between two points in order to hang and dry laundry
A clothes line, also spelled clothesline, also known as a wash line, is a device for hanging clothes on for the purpose of drying or airing out the articles. It is made of any type of rope, cord, wire, or twine that has been stretched between two points (e.g. two posts), outdoors or indoors, above ground level. Washing lines are attached either from a post or a wall, and are frequently located in back gardens, or on balconies. Longer washing lines often have props holding up the mid-section so the weight of the clothing does not pull the clothesline down to the ground.
Clothing that has recently been washed is hung over the line to dry. Nowadays it is held in place with clothespins, but until the 19th century laundry was simply draped over the line (and often blew away), as is visible in artistic depictions of clotheslines from earlier periods. The clothespin was not invented until 1809.
More elaborate rotary washing lines save space and are typically retractable and square or triangular in shape, with multiple lines being used (such as the Hills Hoist from Australia). Some can be folded up when not in use.
The public source identifies “Clothes line” as rope stretched between two points in order to hang and dry laundry. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Clothes, line and rope.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1432810. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1809.
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This entry incorporates text from “Clothes line” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.