dry
Definitions
General English
- verb to become dry
- verb to wipe something until it is dry
General Science
- adjective with very little moisture
Cars & Driving
- verb to lose or make lose its wetness
Food
- adjective used for describing wine that is not sweet
- adjective used for describing a place in which the drinking of alcohol is forbidden
- verb to remove water from something
Medical
- adjective containing only a small amount of moisture
Theater
- To find oneself unable to speak the next line of a part. This may be owing to simple memory failure or, more alarmingly, to stage fright or some even stranger aberration. Other graphic terms for this terrifying experience - every actor's nightmare - include to blank (literally, to feel one's mind go blank) and to freeze (implying physical as well as mental paralysis).
Travel
- adjective not sweet, used especially of wine
Wine
- used to describe a wine in which the sugars have been almost totally fermented, producing a wine that has no noticeable sweetness. A dry wine is commonly defined as one containing less than about 0.5 per cent residual sugar.
Origin & History of “dry”
Dry comes ultimately from prehistoric Germanic *draugiz, a derivative of the base *draug-, *drūg-, which also produced English drought and drain. Its other Germanic relatives are Dutch droog and German trocken, and some have connected it with Old Norse drjūgr ‘lasting, strong’, Old Prussian drūktai ‘firmly’, and Lithuanian dialect drūktas ‘thick, strong’ – the theory being that strength and endurance are linked with ‘drying out’.
