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degrease

verbC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — grease sits at #3,072Too rare in one of the two pools to compare — fewer than 20 uses in speech or in writing

Other forms: degreasing

To degrease is to remove thick fat from a surface. Degrease the extractor, degrease before painting.

Hot water and detergent do it because detergent grips water at one end and grease at the other. To degrease a surface before painting is what stops the paint lifting later.

Definitions of degrease

  1. 1verbdegreaseTo remove thick fat from a surface.C1

    “It took an evening to degrease the whole of the cooker hood.”

degrease is a cleaning.

Where it comes from

  1. Middle English

    grece

  2. English

    grease

  3. English, today

    degrease

From de- + grease. grease comes from Middle English grece. From Middle English grece, from Anglo-Norman craisse, from Vulgar Latin crassia, noun derived from Latin crassus (“fat, thick”). a doublet of crass.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Cleaning & Housework

Practise this word

degrease in the wild

  • In culinary science, degreasing is done with the intention of reducing the fat content of a meal.

    Degreasing

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • grease
  • greasy