the.com/douse
The verb that ends fires, hopes, and arguments with one decisive splash.
means To drench something with liquid, or to extinguish a flame or light suddenly.
from A word of murky beginnings, surfacing in English in the 1500s. It may have started as 'douse' meaning to strike or thrust, possibly from an old dialectal sense of hitting — the leap from 'to thrust into water' to 'to soak' is easy to imagine. Some link it to Middle Dutch 'dossen' (to beat), but the trail is honestly faint. The 'put out a fire' sense came later, the natural child of all that drenching.
- old roots
- Possibly from a 16th-century word meaning to strike or thrust
- double duty
- Means both to drench and to extinguish
- nautical past
- Sailors doused sails by lowering them quickly
- dousing vs dowsing
- One uses water, the other hunts for it
great chicago fire — 1871 fire that destroyed much of chicago, doused by heavy rains and firefighting efforts
operation meeting engage — us military operation in 2003 iraq where troops doused insurgent positions with water and chemicals