mailles

Mailles is a French term that designates either a stitch in knitting and crochet or a small loop that forms a fabric, or more broadly a mesh or network of interlinked elements. The word is the plural of maille.

In knitting, a maille is one loop created on a needle; the pattern is built from many mailles arranged in rows and columns. The number of mailles across the width and the way they are worked (for example maille endroit and maille envers) determine the fabric’s texture and gauge. In crochet, the word is used more loosely for stitches, with terms such as mailles serrées describing specific stitch types.

In chain mail and armor, mailles refer to the individual metal rings or links that connect to form a protective mesh. The size and density of the mailles affect flexibility and protection, influencing how the armor drapes and moves.

In technical fields, maillage or mailles describe a mesh used to discretize a space in numerical methods, such as finite element analysis or computational fluid dynamics, as well as in computer graphics for mesh modeling. Each element or cell is a maille.

Outside specialized contexts, mailles also indicate the overall pattern or structure of a fabric, be it knit, woven, or netting, and the term is commonly encountered in French textile instruction and hardware descriptions.