means A soft, lustrous fiber spun by silkworms, woven into a smooth and prized fabric.

from From Old English 'seoloc' or 'sioloc,' borrowed via the Baltic and Slavic trade routes — Old Slavic 'shelkŭ' — from a distant source that traces, somewhat shakily, all the way back to the Greek 'Sēres,' the name for the silk-producing peoples of the East (almost certainly the Chinese). The very word, in other words, walked the Silk Road westward alongside the cloth itself, getting reshaped by every tongue it passed through.