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soak

verbverbnounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//səʊk//
  • United States//soʊk//

To be saturated with liquid by being immersed in it.

verb

  1. 1

    To be saturated with liquid by being immersed in it.

    I'm going to soak in the bath for a couple of hours.

    Their land shall be soaked with blood.

  2. 2

    To immerse in liquid to the point of saturation or thorough permeation.

    Soak the beans overnight before cooking.

  3. 3

    To penetrate or permeate by saturation.

    The water soaked into my shoes and gave me wet feet.

    The rivulet beneath […]soaked its way obscurely through wreaths of snow.

  4. 4

    To allow (especially a liquid) to be absorbed; to take in, receive. (usually + up)

    A sponge soaks up water; the skin soaks in moisture.

    I soaked up all the knowledge I could at university.

    The case was that of a murder. It had an element of mystery about it, however, which was puzzling the authorities. A turban and loincloth soaked in blood had been found; also a staff.

  5. 5

    figurativeTo overcharge or swindle out of a large amount of money.

    It's a blackmail ring, and the district attorneys get a share of the loot. […] Well, they got him in the same kind of jam, and soaked him to the tune of three hundred and eighty-six thousand.

    Sure, if we own an aerospace contracting company, a five-thousand-acre sugar-beet farm, or a savings and loan with the president's son on the board of directors, we can soak Uncle Sucker for millions.

  6. 6

    datedTo drink intemperately or gluttonously.

  7. 7

    To heat (a metal) before shaping it.

  8. 8

    To hold a kiln at a particular temperature for a given period of time.

    We should soak the kiln at cone 9 for half an hour.

  9. 9

    figurativeTo absorb; to drain.

    That they will want a certaine sucking and soaking

  10. 10

    slangTo engage in penetrative sex without hip thrusting.

Etymology

From Middle English soken, from Old English socian (“to soak, steep”, literally “to cause to suck (up)”), from Proto-Germanic *sukōną (“to soak”), causative of Proto-Germanic *sūkaną (“to suck”). Cognate with Middle Dutch soken (“to cause to suck”). More at suck.

verb

  1. 1

    (slang, boxing) To hit or strike.

    Wasn't Mr. Sipperley pretty shirty when he came to and found that you had been soaking him with putters?

noun

  1. 1

    An immersion in water etc.

    After the strenuous climb, I had a nice long soak in a bath.

    wildlife tourism has turned Knepp into a successful business that employs more people than it did when it was a farm. Springtime overnighters snuggling down in a luxury treehouse after a soak in the open-air, wood-fired Swedish Hikki bathtub may hear nightingales serenading their consorts

  2. 2

    slangA drunkard.

  3. 3

    slangA carouse; a drinking session.

  4. 4

    A low-lying depression that fills with water after rain.

    I set off early to walk along the Melbourne Road where, one of the punters had told me, there was a soak with plenty of frogs in it.

    Molly and Daisy finished their breakfast and decided to take all their dirty clothes and wash them in the soak further down the river.

Forms

plural
soaks
past tense
soaked
past participle
soaked
present participle
soaking
third person singular
soaks
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).