Other forms: dusted, dusting, dusts
Dust is the fine grey powder that settles on anything you leave alone. The film on top of a bookshelf, the grey fluff under a bed, the cloud that puffs out when you beat a rug.
The verb runs both ways, which catches people out. You dust a shelf to take the dust off it, and you dust a cake with icing sugar to put powder on it. Any fine powder can be dust: sawdust, gold dust, chalk dust, the dust of a dry road in August. Dusty, duster and dustbin all come off it. And the fixed phrases are everywhere — when the dust settles means when things calm down, a book gathering dust is one nobody opens, and to bite the dust is to fail or to die.
1noundustFine dry powder made of earth, skin, fibres and other tiny particles, which settles on surfaces.~85%
“There was a thick layer of dust on top of the wardrobe.”
2verbwipeTo clean dust off a surface with a cloth or brush.~2%
“He dusts the shelves every Saturday morning.”
3verbsprinkleTo scatter a fine powder lightly over something.~2%
“Dust the cake with icing sugar just before serving.”
4nounnamedFine powder made from a named substance.~11%
“Gold dust was panned from the river by the hundredweight.”
synonyms: powder, particles
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Dust comes from Old English dūst, dried earth or anything else ground down to powder. Two older words seem to have run together behind it: Proto-Germanic *dustą, dust, and *dunstą, mist or evaporation. Both go back to a Proto-Indo-European root *dʰewh₂- meaning to smoke or raise dust — which is why German Dunst still means haze, and why the oldest sense of the word is closer to a cloud in the air than to grime on a shelf.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰewh₂- — to smoke, raise dust
Proto-Germanic
*dustą — dust
Old English
dūst — dust, dried earth reduced to powder; other dry material reduced to powder
Middle English
dust
English, today
dust
Built from
From Middle English dust, doust, from Old English dūst (“dust, dried earth reduced to powder; other dry material reduced to powder”), from the fusion of Proto-Germanic dustą (“dust”) and dunstą (“mist, dust, evaporation”), both from Proto-Indo-European dʰewh₂- (“to smoke, raise dust”). Cognate with Scots dust, dist (“dust”), Dutch duist (“pollen, dust”) and dons (“down, fuzz”), German Dust (“dust”) and Dunst (“haze”), Swedish dust (“dust”), Icelandic dust (“dust”), Latin fūmus (“smoke, steam”). Also related to Swedish dun (“down, fluff”), Icelandic dúnn (“down, fluff”). See down.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA