One way to hold this word: a bolt of cheap cotton cloth rolling off a machine. Two things about that cloth do all the work later. It is cotton — plain, thick, undyed if nobody prints on it. And it is the cloth people print patterns onto, block after block of color across the whole length. Follow the plain side and you get the British cloth and the things made from it. Follow the printed side and you get the American cloth, and then the color word that jumped from the cloth to an animal: a cat that looks as if its patches had been printed on.
From the word’s history
The supplied Wiktionary entry derives calico from Calicut, the Indian port the cloth was first exported from, itself from Malayalam Kozhikode. So the word is a place name that stuck to a product, which is why it names a cloth rather than describing one.
手上的 Wiktionary 資料說 calico 來自印度港口 Calicut（源自馬拉雅拉姆語的 Kozhikode），也就是這種棉布最早出口的地方。所以這個字本來是地名，黏在貨物上就變成布的名字。這也說明了為什麼它只是「叫這個名字的布」，字面上並沒有描述布長什麼樣。
Wiktionary (kaikki source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:1207959600), supplied in the evidence packet
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