Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

loofah

UK/ˈluːfə/US/ˈluːfə/
nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,326 of 15,258mostly spoken

A loofah is a rough natural sponge for scrubbing skin. Use a loofah, a dried loofah, scrub with a loofah.

It is not a sea sponge at all but the dried inner fibre of a gourd, grown on a vine like a cucumber and left to dry until only the skeleton remains. It should be dried between uses, since a damp loofah grows bacteria readily.

‘Uncle Carl’ (カールおじさん). · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of loofah

  1. 1nounloofahA rough natural sponge for scrubbing skin.B2+

    “She scrubbed her back with a loofah in the shower.”

loofah is a sponge.

Where it comes from

  1. Arabic

    لوف

  2. English, today

    loofah

Borrowed from Arabic لوف.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Hair & Grooming

Practise this word

loofah in the wild

  • The fully developed fruit is the source of the loofah scrubbing sponge.

    Luffa

  • English common English names include angled luffa, Chinese okra, dish cloth gourd, ridged gourd, sponge gourd, vegetable gourd, strainer vine, ribbed loofah, silky gourd, and silk gourd.

    Luffa acutangula

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.