Other forms: irrigated, irrigating, irrigates
To irrigate is to bring water to dry land so crops can grow. Irrigate the fields, irrigated farmland, drip irrigation.
It is what made settled farming possible in dry regions and it is the largest single use of fresh water in the world — around seventy per cent of it. Drip irrigation delivers water to the root rather than the field and uses a fraction of what flooding does. In medicine, to irrigate a wound is to flush it with fluid. Note that the Latin means to lead water in.
1verbirrigateTo bring water to dry land so crops can grow.
“Farmers use water from the river to irrigate their fields during the dry season.”
2verbflushTo flush a wound with fluid.
“The nurse irrigated the wound with salt water to wash out the dirt.”
irrigate is a watering.
Latin irrigare is in plus rigare, to water or moisten. The word entered English in 1615 and the medical sense followed the agricultural one.
Latin
irrigātus
English, today
irrigate
1615; Latin irrigātus, perfect passive participle of irrigō, see -ate. See also Middle English irrigat (“watered, irrigated”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Farm & Countryside