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wade

verbnounnouncommon in dialogue

  • Scotland//wed//
  • //weɪd//

To walk through water or something that impedes progress.

verb

  1. 1

    To walk through water or something that impedes progress.

    So eagerly the fiend […] / With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way, / And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.

    After breakfast the men set out to hunt, while the women went to a large pool of warm water covered with a green scum and filled with billions of tadpoles. They waded in to where the water was about a foot deep and lay down in the mud. They remained there from one to two hours and then returned to the cliff.

  2. 2

    To progress with difficulty.

    to wade through a dull book

    And wades through fumes, and gropes his way.

    The king's admirable conduct has waded through all these difficulties.

  3. 3

    To walk through (water or similar impediment); to pass through by wading.

    wading swamps and rivers

  4. 4

    To gleam intermittently through clouds or mist.

    I saw my Meg come linking o'er the lee; I saw my Meg, but Maggy saw nae me: For yet the sun was wading through the mist, And she was close upon me ere she wist.

    ... the pale light of a crescent moon wading among the black and lowering clouds.

    When sunshine has a scorching and enervating effect on man, during the greater part of the day, the next day will be cloudy and perhaps rainy. When the sun wades through clouds of any kind, rain may or may not follow;

    […] the sun is "wading" when it is struggling through a heavy scud, and the moon is "sitting" when her dark side is turned towards the earth. The poets themselves may be in vain searched for a finer expression than the first.

  5. 5

    To enter recklessly.

    to wade into a fight or a debate

    The champ [Alekhine] seems to reel and stagger helplessly. It's an old gag because a blind man can see he ain't glassy-eyed a-tall—but Rodzinsky wades in. 10.QxR

    Thailand’s Queen Mother Sirikit, who brought glamour to a postwar revival in the country’s monarchy and who, in later years, would occasionally wade into politics, has died aged 93 […]

Etymology

From Middle English waden, from Old English wadan, from Proto-West Germanic *wadan, from Proto-Germanic *wadaną (“to go, pass through”), from Proto-Indo-European *weh₂dʰ- (“to go”). Cognates include Saterland Frisian waadje (“to wade”), West Frisian wâdzje (“to wade”), Dutch waden (“to wade”), German Low German waden (“to wade”), German waten (“to wade”), Danish vade (“to wade”), Swedish vada (“to wade”), Icelandic vaða (“to wade”), and Latin vādō (“go, walk; rush”).

noun

  1. 1

    An act of wading.

    We had to be careful during our dangerous wade across the river.

  2. 2

    A ford; a place to cross a river.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of woadobsoleteObsolete form of woad.

    Woad or Wade is a very rich Commodity

Forms

plural
wades
past tense
waded
past participle
waded
present participle
wading
third person singular
wades
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).