Awash means covered or flooded with water, or overflowing with something. The deck was awash, awash with money, streets awash.
It began as a sailor's word for something level with the surface of the sea, and the figurative use — awash with cash, awash with rumours — is now far commoner. Note the a- prefix, which makes adverbs of state, as in ablaze, adrift and asleep.
1adjectiveawashCovered or flooded with water, or overflowing with something.
“After the storm, the streets were awash with muddy water.”
awash is a state of flooding.
Middle English
wasshen
English
wash
English, today
awash
From a- + wash. wash comes from Middle English wasshen. From Middle English wasshen,waschen,weschen (“to wash”), from Old English wascan (“to wash”), from Proto-West Germanic waskan (“to wash”), from Proto-Germanic waskaną,watskaną (“to wash, get wet”), from Proto-Indo-European wed- (“wet, water”). Cognate with stq waaske (“to wash”), West Frisian waskje (“to wash”), Dutch wassen, wasschen (“to wash”), Low German waschen (“to wash”), German waschen (“to wash”), Danish vaske (“to wash”), Faroese - and Icelandic vaska (“to wash”), Norwegian Bokmål vaske (“to wash”), Norwegian Nynorsk vaske, vaska (“to wash”), Swedish vaska* (“to wash”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA