bath
Definitions
General English
- noun a large container in which you can sit and wash your whole body
- noun the process of washing your whole body
- verb to wash yourself or someone else in a bath
Cars & Driving
- noun the process of immersion or the container used
Publishing
- noun a large open container for liquids, especially one for developing photographs
Slang
- noun a girl. A term used by young street-gang members in London since around 2000.
Origin & History of “bath”
Bath is a word widely dispersed among the Germanic languages (German has bad, as does Swedish). like the others, Old English bæth goes back to a hypothetical Germanic *batham, which perhaps derives from the base *ba- (on the suffix -th see (birth)). If this is so, it would be an indication (backed up by other derivatives of the same base, such as bake, and cognate words such as Latin fovēre ‘heat’, source of English foment) that the original notion contained in the word was of ‘heat’ rather than ‘washing’. This is preserved in the steam bath and the Turkish bath. The original verbal derivative was bathe, which goes back to Germanic *bathōn (another derivative of which, Old Norse batha, had a reflexive form bathask, which probably lies behind English bask); use of bath as a verb dates from the 15th century.
