dirt
/dɜːt/ · noun
Meaning
- Soil or earth.
- A stain or spot (on clothes etc); any foreign substance that worsens appearance.
- Previously unknown facts or rumors about a person.
- Meanness; sordidness.
- In placer mining, earth, gravel, etc., before washing.
- Freckles.
- Excrement; dung.
- To make foul or filthy; soil; befoul; dirty
- Acronym of Deposit Interest Retention Tax.
Etymology / origin
From Middle English drit (“excrement”), from Old Norse drit (“excrement”), from Proto-Germanic *dritą, *dritō (“excrement”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰreyd-, *treydʰ- (“to have diarrhea”). Cognate with dialectal Danish and Norn drit (“excrement”), Norwegian dritt (“excrement”), dialectal Swedish dret (“shit”), Faroese and Icelandic drit (“bird excrement”), Dutch drijten (“to defecate”), drits (“dirt, mud, filth”), drijt and dreet (“excrement”), Low German drieten (“to defecate”), Driet (“shit”), regional German Driss (“shit”), Old English ġedrītan (“to defecate”). The word originally referred to excrement before shifting to the current sense of "soil". For a semantic parallel, see Norwegian skitt (“dirt, filth, grime, mud”), from Old Norse skítr (“shit”), which is cognate with English shit.
- ġedrītan(ang)→
- Driss(German)→
- drieten(Low German)→
- drijten(Dutch)→
- drit(Icelandic)→
- -(fo)→
- dret(Swedish)→
- dritt(no)→
- drit(nrn)→
- -(da)→
- *dʰreyd-(ine-pro)→
- *dritą(gem-pro)→
- drit(non)→
- drit(Middle English)→
- dirt (English)
- Relations: inh, der, der, der, cog, cog, cog, cog, cog, cog, cog, cog, cog, cog
Related words
Descendant words
- dothi(Chichewa) (cog)
- drite(English) (cog)
- ダート(Japanese) (bor)
- Driet(Limburgish) (cog)
- дристать(Russian) (cog)
- doti(Sranan Tongo) (der)
- dret(Swedish) (cog)
- udoti(Zulu) (bor)
Sources
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