Textiles are easily contaminated by heavy metals in the course of processing. In order to monitor the quality of textiles, a new method was developed for simultaneous determination of arsenic, antimony, lead, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, copper, nickel and mercury in textiles by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) after microwave-assisted dilute nitric acid extraction. After optimizing extraction conditions, we ultimately selected 5% nitric acid as extractant and 5 min as extraction time with the extraction temperature of 120 degrees C and instrument power of 400W in the microwave-assisted extraction procedure. Nine hazardous elements were detected sequentially by ICP-OES. The results showed that the detection limits were 0.3-15 microg x L(-1) and the recoveries 73.6%-105% with the RSDs (n = 3) of 0.1%-3%. The proposed method was successfully used to determine nine elements in cotton, wool, terylene and acrylic.