hoover

noun

1. 1

   A vacuum cleaner, irrespective of brand.

   And the brooms lined up behind the buckets, and the dusters, dustpans, cloths and brushes, feather dusters and sweepers all lined up bravely to do battle with the thousand upright Hoovers. The Hoovers charged, engines roaring and bags fully inflated.

   Vacuuming the house is a very quick way of sprucing it up simply because you can use the hoover to push everything out of the way. Cleaning an average-size room is also the exercise equivalent of ten minutes on the Nordic Skier, while changing the hoover bag is the mental equivalent of doing a Rubik's cube in a dust storm.

verb

1. 1

   To clean (a room, etc.) with a vacuum cleaner, irrespective of the brand.

   I need to hoover this room.

   This time Robbie was dreaming about Mr Spatchley's ducks. They had all come alive and were flying around the office whilst Robbie desperately tried to hoover the floor. There were ducks everywhere, on the desk and mantelpiece and padding around on the floor, knocking things over and quacking indignantly.

   In the freshly hoovered living room of her house in Wokingham, Thelma Dawnton was distinctly miffed.

   In honour of my visit, he'd gotten rid of 'most' of the cobwebs, and washed and hoovered the walls next to the bed. Hoovered the walls? What sort of creatures were living in the gaps in the stone that would need to be hoovered out?

2. 2

   To use a vacuum cleaner, irrespective of brand.

   I'd hoover, iron or dust, but I hated doing windows.

   […] she was always in trouble for not hoovering behind the bed picked up what I could of it still there after he hoovered […]

   A woman from a funding agency visited the station for a meeting early one morning, and when she arrived I was doing the hoovering. My colleague introduced us and we chatted for a bit. Then she asked me what my job was and I told her 'station manager'. She looked really puzzled, and asked 'so why are you doing the hoovering?' I answered, 'because the floor was dirty.'

   Up and down the wooden stairs of the house in Cambridge large balls of dust and dog hair bounced. Toby wondered whether John Lambert III, if he'd stuck around, would have hoovered. The hoover stopped and the man wound in the cord, admiring his handiwork. The silence pounded against Toby's eardrums. It seemed that real men hoovered.

3. 3

   To suck in or inhale, as if by a vacuum cleaner.

   'You're probably thinking I'm a slob,' said Lister, finishing off a quintuple-thick milkshake and hoovering around the base with the straw.

   Then there is the little-known family of organisms called hantaviruses, which swarm in the micro-haze above the feces of mice and rats and are hoovered into the human respiratory system by anyone unlucky enough to stick a breathing orifice near them—by lying down, say, on a sleeping platform over which infected mice have recently scampered.

   The early models of famine early warning systems adopted the approach of gathering all possible (or measurable) indicators, adding them up and deducing vulnerability. This was termed the hoovering approach—vulnerability was the weight of the bag after vacuuming up everything in sight (hoovering is the British word for vacuuming).

   We devoured the food, and all along we three boys were bubbling with excitement, telling Mom about the hole. As Dad "hoovered" away, slurping, chewing, gulping, and snorting, Rudy said, "Mom, you would not believe the hole; it's beautiful. Jeffrey designed it and we dug it together ... even Berto helped."

Forms

plural

hoovers

past tense

hoovered

past participle

hoovered

present participle

hoovering

third person singular

hoovers