Definition
adjMade up of liquid or moisture, usually (but not always) water.
adjOf an object, etc.: covered or impregnated with liquid, usually (but not always) water.
Sentence Examples
He's got a face like a month of wet Sundays.
The paint on the seat on which you are sitting is still wet.
Word Origin & History
From Middle English wet (“wet, moistened”), wett, wette, past participle of Middle English weten (“to wet”), from Old English wǣtan (“to wet, moisten, water”), from Proto-West Germanic *wātijan, from Proto-Germanic *wētijaną (“to wet, make wet”), from Proto-Indo-European *wed- (“water, wet”) (also the source of water).
Cognate with Scots weit, wete (“to wet”), Saterland Frisian wäitje (“to wet; drench”), Icelandic væta (“to wet”). Compare also Middle English weet (“wet”), from Old English wǣt (“wet, moist, rainy”), from Proto-West Germanic *wāt, from Proto-Germanic *wētaz (“wet, moist”), related to Scots weit, weet, wat (“wet”), North Frisian wiat, weet, wäit (“wet”), Saterland Frisian wäit (“wet”), West Frisian wiet (“wet”), Middle Dutch wet (“wet, damp, watery”), Swedish and Norwegian våt (“wet”), Danish våd (“wet”), Faroese vátur (“wet”), Icelandic votur (“wet”).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"Parents and small children can stay cool and soaking wet at interactive water playgrounds."
— 2013 July 31, Thom Patterson, “How to get soaking wet this summer”, in CNN:
"“Everybody is interested in extremes – the hottest, the wettest, the windiest – so creating a database of professionally verified records is useful in that fact alone,” says Randall Cerveny from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)."
— 2017 June 15, Hiufu Wong, “11 extreme weather records”, in CNN:
"February 2020 was officially the wettest February on record for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the second wettest (behind 1990) for Scotland."
— 2020 May 20, Paul Stephen, “NR beats floods to secure tracks to Drax”, in Rail, page 58:
"While the study doesn’t directly shed light on why, it suggested that maintaining a similar degree of mobility as the climate changed to the warmer and wetter pattern we have today could have imparted additional stress as the mammoth encountered unfamiliar environments or restricted its movement."
— 2021 August 12, Katie Hunt, “Mammoths were the original ‘ice road truckers,’ traveling vast distances across the Arctic”, in CNN:
"I'm gonna get you wet. I'm gonna get you very wet. I know how to do this."
— 1980, Paul Schrader, American Gigolo, spoken by Julian Kaye (Richard Gere):