Skip to main content
PlainSpell

rayon

/ˈɹeɪɒn/noun

rayon is a noun meaning “A manufactured regenerated cellulosic fiber” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled R-A-Y-O-N and has 2 syllables, and it appears about once in every 1 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of rayon is rayons.

What does rayon mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A manufactured regenerated cellulosic fiber.

  2. 2

    obsoleterareA ray or beam of light.

  3. 3

    A circular area whose extent is measured by the length of the radius of the circle which bounds it.

  4. 4

    Alternative spelling of raion.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce rayon?

  • /ˈɹeɪɒn/

As a noun (“A ray or beam of light”): /ˈɹeɪɒn/, /reɪˈjɔ̃/, /rɛˈjɔ̃/.

Rayon has 2 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-rayon.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of rayon

  • rayons plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is rayon?

Rayon appears about once in every 1 million words in written English, the 29,270th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Rayon in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense cellulosic fiber:

LanguageWords
Frenchrayonne

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does rayon come from?

Name chosen by the National Retail Dry Goods Association of America, probably from French rayon (“a beam of light, ray”) and so called because it is shiny; however, the Oxford English Dictionary states that it is apparently a blend of ray + cotton.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).