wash
pronunciation
How to pronounce wash in British English:
UK [wɒʃ]
How to pronounce wash in American English:
US [wɑːʃ]
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- Noun:
- a thin coat of water-base paint
- the work of cleansing (usually with soap and water)
- the dry bed of an intermittent stream (as at the bottom of a canyon)
- the erosive process of washing away soil or gravel by water (as from a roadway)
- the flow of air that is driven backwards by an aircraft propeller
- a watercolor made by applying a series of monochrome washes one over the other
- garments or white goods that can be cleaned by laundering
- any enterprise in which losses and gains cancel out
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- Verb:
- clean with some chemical process
- cleanse (one's body) with soap and water
- cleanse with a cleaning agent, such as soap, and water
- move by or as if by water
- be capable of being washed
- admit to testing or proof
- separate dirt or gravel from (precious minerals)
- apply a thin coating of paint, metal, etc., to
- remove by the application of water or other liquid and soap or some other cleaning agent
- form by erosion
- make moist
- wash or flow against
- to cleanse (itself or another animal) by licking
Word Origin
- wash
- wash: [OE] Etymologically, to wash something is probably to clean it with ‘water’. Like German waschen, Dutch wasschen, and Swedish vaska, it goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *waskan, which seems to have been derived from *wat-, the base which produced English water. (Washer ‘small disc with a hole’ [14] is usually assumed to come from the same source, but its semantic link with wash has never been satisfactorily explained.)=> water
- wash (v.)
- Old English wascan "to wash, cleanse, bathe," transitive sense in late Old English, from Proto-Germanic *watskan "to wash" (cognates: Old Norse vaska, Middle Dutch wasscen, Dutch wassen, German waschen), from stem *wed- "water, wet" (see water (n.1)). Related: Washed; washing. Used mainly of clothes in Old English (the principal verb for washing the body, dishes, etc. being þwean). Old French gaschier "to stain, soil; soak, wash" (Modern French gâcher) is from Frankish *waskan, from the same Germanic source. Italian guazzare also is a Germanic loan-word. To wash (one's) hands of something id 1550s, from Pilate in Matt. xxvii.24. To wash up "clean utensils after a meal" is from 1751. Washed up "no longer effective" is 1923, theater slang, from notion of washing up at the end of a job.
- wash (n.)
- late Old English wæsc "act of washing," from wash (v.). Meaning "clothes set aside to be washed" is attested from 1789; meaning "thin coat of paint" is recorded from 1690s; sense of "land alternately covered and exposed by the sea" is recorded from mid-15c.
Example
- 1. Wash your feet , and a slave will dry them .
- 2. She used to wash dishes in a restaurant .
- 3. The doorbell rings and she asks them to go wash their hands .
- 4. Use the appropriate wash cycle .
- 5. Why would you want to keep kissing someone who won 't wash up ?