Other forms: dissolved, dissolving, dissolves
To dissolve is to disappear into a liquid. Drop a sugar cube into hot tea and stir: the cube clouds at the edges, loses its corners, shrinks, and then the spoon is going round in nothing but sweet tea.
Salt dissolves in water, an aspirin dissolves in a glass, a stock cube dissolves in the pan — and the preposition is in, not into. Melting is a different thing and the two get muddled: ice melts in the sun with no liquid to go into, sugar dissolves in tea. The word also does formal endings. A parliament is dissolved before an election, a company or a partnership is dissolved when it is wound up, a marriage is dissolved by a court. And it does crowds and faces: the crowd dissolved into the side streets, she dissolved into laughter halfway through the story.
1verbdissolveTo mix into a liquid until it becomes part of it and can no longer be seen.~37%
“Stir until the sugar has dissolved.”
Patterndissolve in + liquid · dissolve sth in water · dissolved sugar / salt · dissolve completely
2verbwindTo formally end a parliament, a company, or a marriage.~56%
“Parliament was dissolved in May.”
3verbdisperseTo break up and disappear.~5%
“The crowd dissolved into the side streets.”
4verbovercomeTo be overcome by tears or laughter.~2%
“She dissolved into laughter halfway through the story.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 179 sentences found in the wild and placed 165 of them on a sense (14 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
DISS-olve → DIZZY
Drop a sugar cube into hot tea and stir. The cube goes round and round, dizzy, losing an edge each turn, until the spoon comes up through clear sweet water and finds nothing at all.
hooks ontodizzy
Latin dissolvō was dis-, apart, and solvō, to loose or loosen — so to dissolve is to undo the knot holding a thing together and let the pieces go. The same solvō sits inside solve and solution, which is why the chemist's solution and the solution to a puzzle are one word: something loosened until it comes apart.
Proto-Indo-European
*lewh₁-
Anglo-Norman
dissoldre
Latin
dissolvo — to loosen up, break apart
Middle English
dissolven
English, today
dissolve
Built from
Recorded since c. 1374 (displacing Old English toliesan) as Middle English dissolven, from Latin dissolvo (“to loosen up, break apart”) but with the sense from Anglo-Norman dissoldre (variant of Old French dissoudre), itself from dis- (“apart”) + solvo (“to loose, loosen”). by surface analysis, dis- + solve.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA