A textile is any object made of fibrous material by people. "By people" excludes naturally occurring textile-like objects, such as spider webs, birds' nests, beaver dams, etc, so we're only talking about human artifacts here. "Of fibrous material" means that the object contains fibers.
So what is a fiber? A fiber is any object with a length at least 1000 times its diameter. Basically, a fiber is a very long, very skinny object. There are three main types of fibers: natural, regenerated, and synthetic. Natural and synthetic fibers are fairly self-explanatory: natural fibers are those the occur in nature as long, skinny objects, and require human intervention only to free them from the rest of the plant or animal in which they grow. Wool, silk, cotton, and linen are natural fibers. Synthetic fibers are entirely synthesized by humans, built molecule by molecule and polymer by polymer out of petroleum-derived molecular soup. These fibers do not exist in nature as long, skinny objects, nor do the materials of which they are made exist in nature. Synthetic fibers include nylon, polyester, acrylic, and spandex. Regenerated fibers are a kind of hybrid of natural and synthetic fibers: they are made of naturally-occuring polymer material, but are reduced to molecular soup before being formed into long, skinny fibers. The naturally-occuring polymer can be cellulose, as in rayon; casein, from milk; or other material.
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