Dictionaries › English

polish

Pronunciation: /ˈpɒl.ɪʃ/

The English word “polish” has 8 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A substance used to polish.
  2. Cleanliness; smoothness, shininess.
  3. Refinement; cleanliness in performance or presentation.

verb

  1. To shine; to make a surface very smooth or shiny by rubbing, cleaning, or grinding.
  2. To refine; remove imperfections from.
  3. To apply shoe polish to shoes.
  4. To become smooth, as from friction; to receive a gloss; to take a smooth and glossy surface.
  5. To refine; to wear off the rudeness, coarseness, or rusticity of; to make elegant and polite.

Etymology

From Middle English polishen, from Old French poliss-, stem of some of the conjugated forms of polir, from Latin polīre (“to polish, make smooth”), from Proto-Indo-European *pelh₂- (“to drive, strike, thrust”), from the notion of fulling cloth.

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “polish” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.