Dictionaries › English

touch

Pronunciation: /tʌt͡ʃ/

The English word “touch” has 20 meanings listed here.

verb

  1. To make physical contact with; to bring the hand, finger or other part of the body into contact with.
  2. To come into (involuntary) contact with; to meet or intersect.
  3. To come into physical contact, or to be in physical contact.
  4. To make physical contact with a thing.
  5. To physically disturb; to interfere with, molest, or attempt to harm through contact.
  6. To make intimate physical contact with a person.
  7. To sexually excite with the fingers; to finger or masturbate.
  8. To have sexual intercourse with
  9. To cause to be briefly in physical contact with something.
  10. To physically affect in specific ways implied by context.
  11. To begin to consume, or otherwise use.
  12. Of a ship or its passengers: to land, to make a short stop (at).
  13. To lay hands on (someone suffering from scrofula) as a form of cure, as formerly practised by English and French monarchs.
  14. To fasten; to take effect; to make impression.
  15. To bring (a sail) so close to the wind that its weather leech shakes.
  16. To be brought, as a sail, so close to the wind that its weather leech shakes.
  17. To keep the ship as near (the wind) as possible.
  18. To imbue or endow with a specific quality.
  19. To deal with in speech or writing; to mention briefly, to allude to.
  20. To deal with in speech or writing; briefly to speak or write (on or upon something).

Etymology

From Middle English touchen, tochen, from Old French tochier (“to touch”) (whence Modern French toucher; compare French doublet toquer (“to offend, bother, harass”)), from Vulgar Latin *tuccō (“to knock, strike, offend”), from Frankish *tukkōn (“to knock, strike, touch”), from Proto-Germanic *tukkōną (“to tug, grab, grasp”), from Proto-Indo-European *dewk- (“to draw, pull, lead”). Largely…

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