sweat
/swɛt/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.14 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Fluid that exits the body through pores in the skin usually due to physical stress and/or high temperature for the purpose of regulating body temperature and removing certain compounds from the circulation.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "Just thinking about the interview tomorrow puts me into a nervous sweat."
- "The Muses' friend (grey-eyed Aurora) yet Held all the meadows in a cooling sweat, The milk-white gossamers not upwards snow'd, Nor was the sharp and useful-steering goad"
- "the sweat of hay or grain in a mow or stack"
- "A Horſe that gains Fleſh in hard Exerciſe, should be ſweated at leaſt twice in ten Days; and he ſhould run near five Miles in Puſhes, that the Sweat may have Time to diſcharge. Those Horſes which are ſweat without Covering, or with a very thin one, should run a long Sweat, as wel call it, and ſtand a conſiderable while afterwards with a thick Blanket or two over them, from Head to Tail; otherwiſe the Sweat will not come out well."
- "There are some horses so very delicate, and have to run such short lengths, that they may not require a sweat during the whole time of their being in training."
- "A sweat was, accordingly, a training run for a racehorse: a notice in The London Gazette in 1705 advertises a race for hunters that have not 'been kept in sweats above 12 weeks before the day of Running'."
Etymology
From Middle English swete, swet, swate, swote, from Old English swāt, from Proto-Germanic *swait-, *swaitą, from Proto-Indo-European *swoyd- (“to sweat”), o-grade of *sweyd- (“to sweat”). Cognate with West Frisian swit, Dutch zweet, German Schweiß, Danish sved, Norwegian Bokmål svette, Norwegian Nynorsk sveitte, Swedish svett, Yiddish שוויצן (shvitsn) (English shvitz), Latin sudor, French sueur, Italian sudore, Spanish sudor, Portuguese suor, Persian خوی (xway, “sweat”), Sanskrit स्वेद (svéda), Lithuanian sviedri, Tocharian B syā-, Albanian djersë, and Welsh chwys.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *sweyd-, swete, swāt, *swait-, *swoyd-, sweten
Usage
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
Phrases
Frequently Paired Words
shvitz
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