tatamin.

1614 R. Wickham in Trans. Asiatic Soc. Japan (1898) 26 209 I..made Tatamee of Meaco 15⅔.

1614 R. Wickham in Trans. Asiatic Soc. Japan (1898) 26 209 I sold it per 14 Tatamees at 120 Mas per tatame.

1616 R. Cocks Diary 23 Jan. (1883) I. 103 20 tattamis for Matingas howse.

1625 S. Purchas Pilgrimes ii. v. 326 Hee caused at Ozaca a Hall to bee erected, with a thousand Tatami (very elegant mats).

1880 I. L. Bird Unbeaten Tracks Japan I. ix. 89 Japanese house-mats, tatami, are as neat, refined, and soft a covering for the floor as the finest Axminster carpet.

1886 A. C. Maclay Budget of Lett. from Japan 42 Tatamis are heavy padded mats about seven feet long, three feet wide, and about two inches thick. They are the only covering that the Japanese ever use for their floors... They are manufactured of soft rushes, and are bordered with silken edges.

1909 Cent. Dict. Suppl. Tatami..2. A Japanese measure of surface, that of a mat 6 shaku in length by 3 shaku in width, or nearly 6 feet by 3 feet.

1924 Public Opinion 28 Nov. 527/2 It is a strict rule that tatamis must be kept clean.

1933 R. V. C. Bodley Japanese Omelette xii. 116 The dining room floor, instead of being matted with tatami as in Japan, was made of some kind of oilcloth.

1957 New Yorker 23 Nov. 120/2 Tatami cover the floors of nearly all Japanese houses.

1960 B. Leach Potter in Japan iii. 68 In twenty years' time, won't the Japanese room with ‘tatami’ (the thick compressed straw matting) become a luxury as the foreign style is today?

1974 Encycl. Brit. Micropædia IX. 837/3 The standardized size of the mat has created an important modular unit in the development of Japanese architecture; for example the shōji..are approximately as high as the tatami are long.

1976 P. Quennell Marble Foot v. 182 No less beautiful..were the tatami that lined our floors, long greenish slabs, that turn with age a dull gold, of finely woven rush-matting.

1981 G. MacBeth Kind of Treason ix. 92 He relaxed on the tatami and spoke with polite approval of the cousin's tsuba.

1947 J. Bertram Shadow of War vi. 200 Each man had some two and a half feet by six feet of tatami mat.

1962 Times 25 Jan. 13/4 The man who comes to lay the tatami matting in his house.

1979 S. Coe in I. Webb Compl. Guide Flower & Foliage Arrangem. xvii. 231/2 The room..is quite small, about 3 × 3 m (10 × 10 ft) or four and a half tatami mats.

1979 Jrnl. Royal Soc. Arts Nov. 749/1 The interior spaces provide everything that the harsh exterior rejects: complex flowing geometries, traditional tatami room, lush furnishing and peaceful, controlled nature.

1980 ‘J. Melville’ Chrysanthemum Chain 127 The tatami-matted floor of Yamamoto's room.

1981 C. Potok Bk. of Lights (1982) v. 162 He had a fish dinner in a lovely tatami-floored Japanese restaurant.

1982 Nature 20 May 181/1 Thus the popular, but erroneous, Japanese view that they have grown taller by adopting the habit of sitting on Western chairs rather than sitting with legs folded underneath the body on a tatami mat.