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vat

nounverbadjectiveattested in dialogue

  • //væt//

A large tub, such as is used for making wine or for tanning.

noun

  1. 1

    A large tub, such as is used for making wine or for tanning.

    a vat of liquid

    a vat of acid

    a vat of wine

    a vat of olives

  2. 2

    A square, hollow place on the back of a calcining furnace, where tin ore is laid to dry.

  3. 3

    A vessel for holding holy water.

  4. 4

    datedA liquid measure and dry measure; especially, a liquid measure in Belgium and Holland, corresponding to the hectolitre of the metric system, which contains 22.01 imperial gallons, or 26.4 standard gallons in the United States.

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English vat, a dialectal variant of fat (“vat, vessel, cask”), from Old English fæt (“vat, vessel”), from Proto-West Germanic *fat, from Proto-Germanic *fatą (“vessel”), from Proto-Indo-European *pod- (“vessel”). Cognate with Scots fat, vat, vautt (“vat, cask, tub”), West Frisian fet, Dutch vat (“barrel, cask, vessel, vat”), German Fass (“barrel, keg, drum, cask, vat”), Danish fad (“saucer, dish”), Swedish fat (“dish, barrel, cask, vat”), Icelandic fat (“dish, saucer”). See Etymology 3 of fat.

verb

  1. 1

    To put into a vat.

  2. 2

    To blend (wines or spirits) in a vat; figuratively, to mix or blend elements as if with wines or spirits.

adjective

  1. 1

    Designating a vat dye.

    vat red

    vat jade green

Forms

plural
vats
past tense
vatted
past participle
vatted
present participle
vatting
third person singular
vats
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).